Rebecca Sacks, CITY OF A THOUSAND GATES

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Rebecca. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss City of a Thousand Gates. Congratulations on this novel.

Rebecca Sacks: Thank you.

Zibby: This is a literary achievement. This is a big deal. It's interwoven stories, people's lives intersecting, great prose, different characters. It's an epic journey. Congratulations.

Rebecca: Thank you so much. I actually just got the bound copy.

Zibby: Ooh, let's see.

Rebecca: Here. I don't know if you can see.

Zibby: So good.

Rebecca: I know. I'm someone who's very attached to the book as an object, so just holding it and feeling the texture of the cover. I noticed I've been dressing to match it ever since I got it. [laughs]

Zibby: These are great colors. In fact, this would be a great blanket, perhaps, maybe curtains. I think this could be some sort of textile you could involve in your home.

Rebecca: I really loved the design. Harper did such a great job, my publisher, in really listening not just to me as the author, but reading the book carefully. Everything surrounding the book has reflected that so much. This is my first book, my first novel. I had no idea what to expect. The cover, to me, it has that sense of multiple narratives, doors opening and closing, lives intersecting. I was so taken with it. I'm very grateful to them, actually, for hearing me and reflecting the work so beautifully.

Zibby: Tell me about writing this book and when you started it. I know you've had multiple -- Bread Loaf, you've got all these fellowships and retreats. You've been at this for a while. Everybody obviously keeps identifying your talent. When did this start? How did it change and take shape over the years?

Rebecca: It almost feels like we grew up together or something, this novel and I. I'm thirty-four now. I think in a way, I started writing it even before I knew I was writing fiction. I was about twenty-six. I left New York City. I'd been working in magazines. I really lucked out after college. Right after college, I got a job at Vanity Fair. It was the best education you could ask for.

Zibby: I interned at Vanity Fair.

Rebecca: Stop!

Zibby: I did, yes.

Rebecca: Oh, my gosh.

Zibby: You probably were not even born. No, I'm kidding. I'm forty-four. I interned my freshman year of college. When was that? 1995, that summer.

Rebecca: May I ask, were you working directly with anyone? I have such [indiscernible/crosstalk] feelings for that time.

Zibby: I rotated departments. I started in special events. At that time, I had no idea who anybody was. I had to answer the phone.

Rebecca: Sara Marks?

Zibby: Yes, Sara Marks.

Rebecca: So cool, oh, my god.

Zibby: Aimee Bell would walk in, and [indiscernible/crosstalk]. I actually emailed with Aimee Bell recently. I was like, I was an intern. You were there. Did not remember me, but that's fine. Then I moved to the feature department for a little bit with Jane Sarkin.

Rebecca: Oh, my gosh, I love Jane. Wonderful.

Zibby: I remember so well. I'm sure she doesn't remember me either. I was there for like a week in her department.

Rebecca: I was the same. [laughs]

Zibby: I'll never forget because she was on the phone as I was filing slides. I don't know what I was doing for her. She was trying to schedule her c-section based around the Hollywood issue. She must have a child now that was born in 1995.

Rebecca: Wow, what a power move. That's amazing. I really admired everyone I worked with there. I was probably really foolish to leave, but I did. Not long after, I worked very briefly at a travel magazine. It was very cool, a lot fun, Departures. Then I moved to Israel. I thought I was doing a master's in Jewish studies. I was doing a master's. I thought that's why I went. I think really deeper down, I wanted to get lost. I wanted to get lost. I didn't know any Hebrew. I grew up in a very secular home, generally speaking, sort of reform. My mother wasn't born Jewish and didn't convert. We were just raised in this secular, nebulous zone. I didn't have strong feelings one way or the other on Israel. I didn't speak any Hebrew except I knew the brachot for the Hanukkah candles.

Zibby: Good to know. If you're going to know any of them, that's a good one.

Rebecca: I think I wanted to go to a place where I had to articulate everything anew to myself. I had to learn new languages. I spent years studying Hebrew and Arabic. There's all these boundaries, all these divisions. I had to articulate them to myself and learn how to hear them and see them. At that time, I began writing essays for a couple different outlets. The ones I'm most proud of, for sure, were published in The Paris Review's website, The Daily. In a way, I think I was sort of starting the novel at that point in the sense of I was coming to know and to explain to myself, the landscape I was in. A lot of times when you're drafting a story or a novel, the very, very first draft is you telling the story to yourself. Later drafts become ways in which you are telling the story to an audience. You are making it legible to an audience. I think the first draft is a story you tell yourself. In the first drafts, it was a story I was telling myself about a place that had at least two different names for everything, at least, maybe one in Hebrew, one in Arabic, one the UN uses. That's three, at least, different. Eventually, I lost interest in myself as the center of these stories. I felt that I was so limited in the kinds of stories I could tell if I was the narrator and if my body was at the center. I did what I love most. I got lost in other characters, in other lives. That was the story of the novel and I think why it took a good -- gosh, I don't know; I should have these numbers handy -- let's say, six years to write, maybe, and really a process of learning to hear, learning to see, and then learning to disappear into other lives and to let these characters, and as you know, there are quite a few of them in this novel, but let them tell the story of their lives in this place.

Zibby: Wow, that's amazing. Wait, tell me then after you spent all that time how you ended up selling the book, the publication.

Rebecca: I'm sure many people think that they have the best agent, but I have the best agent.

Zibby: Who's your agent, then?

Rebecca: Her name's Joy Harris. She is wonderful. She read this novel. I made a great decision in about 2016. I was living in Israel. I was living in Tel Aviv. I had begun what I thought maybe could be a novel, but I didn't even really know what shape it would have. I almost just had some scenes that felt important to me, some of them based on things people had told me or incidents friends, siblings had told me about that I fictionalized. By fictionalized, I mean maybe they had a narrow miss. What could’ve happened didn't happen, and so I fictionalized it by pushing it farther. What if the worst thing did happen? What would the consequences have been? That kind of thing. It was all really just very early drafting. I came to understand if I really wanted to do this, the best thing I could do for myself would be to go to an MFA where I had full funding where I could write for two, or if I was really lucky and got into a three-year MFA, for three years with full funding, maybe get a little teaching experience. This would be the way that I would have concentrated time to work on the novel as opposed to doing it in the morning between five AM and seven thirty before I went to work. I would definitely still have been writing it, which is fine. That's a very good way to write a book. I wanted more time to devote to it. I wanted to get lost, again I suppose, in the work.

I applied to and got into the MFA at UC Irvine in Orange County just south of where I am now. There's a lot of debate in the writerly world. Do you go to an MFA or not? What does that mean for how it shapes your writing? Who gets in? What are the problematics of these institutions? All very worthwhile discussions. For me personally, it was the best thing I could've done for my work, mostly because I had all of this beautiful time, the ultimate commodity for a writer. One of my teachers there, Michelle Latiolais, she had told her agent about my work, which was very lucky for me because then when I eventually did send Joy my novel, she was at least expecting to see it. I didn't have to wait a few weeks or even months until she got to it in her stack. That was nice. It was nice to arrive at her door, as it were, with a letter of introduction. She became my agent because she loved the book. She was one of the first people I'd spoken to who read it from start to end. She was actually the first person outside of my MFA program. It was just amazing to be read exactly how I hoped I'd be read, someone who was reading the book with her heart. I could feel it. I didn't think about it long.

She's a pro. She was much more ambitious for the book than I was. I didn't think we would go to a big press. That just seemed outsized. I guess I was limited by my own imagination or ambition. She had her own idea. We were going to go to Harper. When people ask me now, maybe friends who are going through the process themselves of looking for an agent, I always say you want someone who is just in love with your book. That's the most important thing, more important than maybe -- there's a lot of other considerations. They're all important too, about the access that person has. Maybe I don't know how long they plan to be working or how long they have been working. Of course, these are all considerations. More than anything, you want someone who is in love with your book and who can share that with anyone that they bring that work to. For anyone who's thinking about agents or shopping, I would say that's what makes your agent the best agent, loving your work very much.

Zibby: That's true. You have to have some sort of meeting of the souls over a book.

Rebecca: What a beautiful way to put it. Totally. Yes. I love that and will use it and quote you.

Zibby: Thank you. Great. [laughs]

Rebecca: I love that.

Zibby: That's awesome. You are a citizen of Israel and the US and Canada, everywhere. You speak languages. You're all over the planet. Tell me about your identity yourself. You're a world traveler. Where do you find yourself at home the most?

Rebecca: I was talking to a friend about this recently, or what feels like recently, but time has been, for all of us, so slippery. A few years ago, I was talking to a friend about this. I was asking him, I was saying, "It's so hard to know where I belong, in a sense." I was in New York City. I moved to Canada, first to New Jersey and then to Canada, all with my family. Then I went to college in the States. Then I moved to Israel. Then I briefly left Israel. I thought I would go to divinity school, not to become a member of the clergy, but to be an academic in religion. It was so funny. I kept dropping out of my translation classes -- this was at Chicago -- to take fiction classes with the novelist Vu Tran. I was like, I think I need to rethink what I'm doing. That was an important few months for me when I was living in Chicago. It was also when I formerly converted to Judaism even though I was raised in a Jewish home. I think I wanted to feel like I was fully embracing not just my Jewish identity, but my place in a Jewish community. Of course, being formerly a Jew is very important for things like being counted in a minyan. It depends, of course, on your denomination whether a woman would be counted. I'm a conservative Jew, so that's all kosher. [laughter] My converting rabbi, a wonderful man named Rabbi David Minkus, a really generous, thoughtful person who never dangled his own power over me in this situation in which you are vulnerable as someone converting, he said a couple wonderful things to me. One was, "You were always a Jew. I'm just making it official," which I thought was sweet.

Another was, it was very interesting, he's like, "You'll always feel like an outsider because we all do," which I also thought was interesting, that even when you make official steps to be embraced by your community, that everyone always, everywhere, feels a little like an outsider. So do I at times. I've wondered if I feel most at home when I have foot in and one foot out of something where I'm a little on the periphery, a little standing back watching the moment happen rather than inside the moment, for example. I've wondered if that's where I feel at home. The friend I was speaking to about this, I was saying it was kind of funny. I was speaking specifically about my status as a Jewish person in Israel where according to, for example, the state of Israel, I am Jewish -- I was granted Israeli citizenship through the law of return which dictates who is eligible for Israeli citizenship based on Jewishness -- but not Jewish according to the Rabanut, the rabbinical authority of the state, which is orthodox. I'm sort of inside and outside there, which is an odd place to be as a person, but a perfect place to be as a writer, I have to admit. Having at once full access and yet being a little excluded is sort of the ideal position to write a novel from. I was speaking to this friend of mine. His name's Benjamin Balint. He wrote a superb book on the fate of Kafka's letters and papers after Kafka died. He said, "Maybe you're at home in the text." I don't know if it's true, but I love the way it sounded.

Zibby: It does sound good. That sounds great.

Rebecca: I think my identity is, in some ways, a little fractured, perhaps. Yet I think because I grew up very much between things, between countries, religions, at times even languages a little, that I feel very purposeful in the choices I've made about the parts of my identity I've chosen to embrace and the communities I've chosen to make myself part of it. None of it feels particularly incidental. It all feels like I made choices about where I wish to belong.

Zibby: That's interesting. I grew up Jewish. I am Jewish. When I was getting remarried, my husband converted to Judaism because my kids are Jewish and blah, blah, blah. I am familiar with that whole process and what that's like and what you have to learn and go through and the commitment of it. We have not gone to Israel. I have actually never been to Israel in my entire life, which is really embarrassing to say. This is on my wish list.

Rebecca: It's hard. There's so much going on. There's so many strong feelings that people have. I completely understand almost the instinct to put it off a little, like a difficult conversation you keep putting off.

Zibby: I'm just going to blame my parents. They should've taken me.

Rebecca: They should've.

Zibby: We went to Italy instead, I guess. I don't know. [laughs]

Rebecca: Wrong side of the Mediterranean.

Zibby: Although, it was a great trip.

Rebecca: I'm sure. When you go and you want recommendations, please don't hesitant to ask.

Zibby: Thank you. Yes, you'll be my go-to on that. Are you at work on another project, or are you just like, oh, my gosh, I finally finished this and I'm putting it off to the side and taking a deep breath for a while?

Rebecca: No, I need to be at work, always. Maybe that's where I'm at home, working, writing. I love that question. I think I'll think about that for the rest of the day. Where am I at home? I'm working on something new. It's interesting. I'm writing in first person which I haven't done in years and years now. It's a very unused muscle. In fact, sometimes I'm finding I have to write in third person as the novel -- I should say to anyone who hasn’t read it yet, the novel is written in a very close, close third where I'm switching to all these points of view. Writing in first person, all these sentences with I, I haven't done it in a while.

Zibby: Did I even ask you to describe what the book was about to listeners?

Rebecca: Oh, with pleasure. What a fun challenge.

Zibby: I usually start with that. Maybe I missed that question. For the people listening, tell them what the book is actually about now that we've talked about your entire life and everything else.

Rebecca: I've enjoyed the attention. [laughs]

Zibby: Oh, good. I had a pleasant time myself.

Rebecca: The book, which I'm holding again because I'm so excited to finally have it, it is set in the present-day West Bank and Jerusalem, so in a place where Israel and Palestine are always in contact in these places. It is a narrative that is, I suppose, not unlike myself, quite fractured in that it follows, my last count, it was about twenty-nine characters that we're following in the aftermath of two tragedies, two ethically motivated murders, one of a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl, Yael, who lives on an Israeli settlement, and in retaliation, a fourteen-year-old Palestinian boy who has no relation to Yael's murder who is brutally beaten in a mall parking lot. These two horrible events reverberate and echo in the lives of Palestinians and Jewish Israelis and Americans in Israel and a German journalist trying to make her name on some newsworthy tragedy. Trying to show the echoes and the iterations of these events in the lives of different communities and families. I'm especially concerned with family life and the way that the political enters family life and shapes it, and within marriages and between parents and children and lovers. Every family, I think, is its own little country in a way.

Zibby: I love that. That's a quote I will use and credit you.

Rebecca: Good. We can trade.

Zibby: That's great. Perfect. Do you have, just as a last question, any advice for aspiring authors? I know that you've already given a lot, particularly with regard to finding agents and not giving up and all this other stuff. What's your advice?

Rebecca: A few things. One is slow down in your telling. In actually writing, so often, we have a place we want the narrative to get to. I do this as well. I don't know how I'm going to get there, but I know I want these two people to have an encounter in this bus or at this checkpoint. I know that's where I want it to go. I can catch myself rushing in the writing to get there. Life happens in the moments on the way, of course, in the sensual, sensory details. Letting yourself go word by word, sentence by sentence to get where you're going. Let the story surprise you. Let yourself find some pleasure in that. It's not always a rush. I would say that would be advice also to myself as I work on something new. It's such an amazing pleasure and honor to hold your own book, but take your time getting there. It'll be worth it.

Zibby: Lovely. Awesome. It was so nice chatting with you today.

Rebecca: It was such a pleasure.

Zibby: I feel like we were just off on some retreat or something. You've taken me out of the sirens and everything here in the city. I feel like you have this sense of Zen or calm to you in the way you speak. I feel much more relaxed now.

Rebecca: Oh, thank you. I can say for my part, I've loved this feeling of being sort of ensconced in your beautiful wooden library. There's such a warmth coming from you and from this room. Thank you. I really enjoyed my visit.

Zibby: If you were in town, I would've had you over here. I used to do all these in person.

Rebecca: I would love that. When that's possible again, I'll come by and I'll bring a copy of the book.

Zibby: Perfect. I will have one already, but I will take another one. [laughter] Have a great day.

Rebecca: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Zibby: Nice to meet you. Bye.

Rebecca: Bye.

Jen Sincero, BADASS HABITS

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Jen. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Jen Sincero: Thanks so much for having me. I love the title of your show.

Zibby: Thank you. I love the title of your books. I feel like you are single-handedly responsible for getting the term badass into mainstream culture. That's quite an accomplishment.

Jen: Thank you very much.

Zibby: No problem. Your latest book tackles habits. Thank you for that. There are so many habits I feel like I want to change. I didn't even know which one to write down in all capital letters as you suggested. I know this is one of many extensions, including how to be better with your money and other things where you can apply the badassery, if you will. Why habits? Why did you pick that to tackle in this book?

Jen: I feel like the first three books, You are a Badass, Badass at Making Money, and You are a Badass Every Day, they're about taking action, but they were really about getting the mindset pieces down and to really wake up to all your screwed-up thoughts and beliefs and actions and words. I felt like habits was the awesome follow-up to those because you could really start implementing some of the stuff you were learning in those books and make them habits. We don't even realize how habitual everything is. The way you think is habitual. The things you talk about are habitual. We're riddled with habits. It was time to really get into that.

Zibby: That was one of my favorite points of the book. You're like, we don't even congratulate ourselves on the habits that we don't think about, like, hey, congratulations, I put my underwear on every day, or all these things that we just do. Your whole argument is we can do anything we want as long as we get in the right mindset, which I felt like was so freeing. It's not hard to make habits. It's just the focusing on them. Getting the right mindset to do it is all that's required, really.

Jen: There are certainly little tricks you can do to make it easier, but yeah, that's really it.

Zibby: I loved your framework. You basically outlined -- by the way, I also loved when you said how to catch yourself from wandering down Woe-is-me Lane. I am totally going to use that because I'm always like, I hate to say woe is me. Woe-is-me Lane, I can see a whole board game with Woe-is-me Lane. Here are the pitfalls. Maybe there needs to be a Badass board game or something.

Jen: Oh, my god, that's an awesome idea. It's a good pandemic project.

Zibby: Pandemic project, there you go, with Woe-is-me Lane in Badassery Village. Anyway, you work on that. In the meantime, you have all these stages like the trigger, the sequence, repetition, ease, patience, and identity which make up habit forming. Take me through this general paradigm. How did you come up with this?

Jen: I started looking at why we behave the way we do. The first thing we do is we unconsciously participate in "reality" because we believe that money is really hard to make or we think that we suck at relationships or we talk about how there's no good men or women out there. We get into these patterns. We unconsciously just take them as truth. It's once we wake up to what we've got going on and question our beliefs and our thoughts and our words and be like, why do I believe that? There's plenty of people doing A, B, C, or D that I have decided that for myself it is impossible and unavailable. The first step is always awareness and always catching yourself in whatever your stories are that are not serving you. That really is the first part. I just outlined that. Then with the triggers and the sequence and all of that, there is very concrete way that habits happen. The trigger is you want to take your dog for a walk. The sequence starts with you putting on your shoes and putting the leash on the dog. Then you go out for the walk. We're unaware of so many of these trigger sequences, things that we've got going on. For a lot of people, a negative habit is -- the trigger is, I'm having a cocktail. Now I got to have a cigarette. Becoming aware of the triggers and the sequences that follow them allow you to unhook from them. It's almost like stepping outside of yourself and watching yourself behave. Then you can be like, you know what, that's not how I want to show up. That's not who I want to be. Then that empowers you to make different choices.

Zibby: That was the other thing I thought was so great, was how to identify a habit worth breaking. You outlined a couple steps, four different parts of this, which made it even harder for me to pick my habit. You said, "Pick habits, one, would give you a sense of being the person you know you're meant to be, a sense of empowerment, an improved quality of life, and a sense of accomplishment." Some of the habits, I was thinking before I started reading this book, are not that important to who I'm meant to me. How I eat is not who I'm meant to be. I would like to stop snacking at night, but that's such a minor thing. It wouldn't make me feel accomplished or proud.

Jen: Think about that, though. Think about that. You have one body that you travel around in for your finite experience on planet Earth. Your body is the most important thing you've got going. Changing how you eat and how you treat it and giving it what it needs to thrive and feel good and stay healthy is epic. That little shift of not eating late at night means your little body that does all these amazing things for you doesn't have to work really hard when it's supposed to be in this regenerative mode of sleeping. It really is all about perspective. Give me another one. I'll knock it down. [laughter]

Zibby: I really said that so that I could continue snacking at night, so if you wouldn't mind taking what you just said and we'll pretend that never happened. Also, developing a habit of writing regularly. I'm so busy. I love to write. I feel like I squeeze my writing into posting on Instagram or little snippets. How great would it be if I could make time to do it? That, I feel like, would give me more of these things than something like working out.

Jen: Back to the body again. [Indiscernible] I'm going to go there.

Zibby: That's a lost cause. Let's go back to try to fit writing in. That's something that people might want to start doing, not changing a bad habit, but just introducing something new into the regular rotation. Tell me a little about that because they're different.

Jen: First, I would start out with busting yourself on why you haven't done it yet and your beliefs and thoughts and words around how hard writing is, about how you don't have the time, about how you've tried before and you failed. Get mighty clear on all the many, many reasons that it hasn’t happened yet and why you think you're going to suck at it because they exist if you're not doing it yet and it's something you want to do. Write them down. It really is about specifics. Write them down and be like, oh, hello. Then question them all and counter them all because they all have counters. You've created this belief system. A lot of the times, it's so subconscious. You've just taken it as truth. I'm a mom. I got a podcast. I got a job. I got a blah, blah, blah. I don't have time. It's true. It's true. It's true. Is it? Could you fit in a fifteen-minute writing session somewhere? Could you set up a boundary with your family to be like, "Listen, you're out of luck. I am writing."? I always talk about how we talk about how we don't have time to work out and treat our bodies right, but if we get sick and go to the hospital, we have time to go to the hospital. We are in the damn hospital. There's suddenly time for that. Time really is, as Einstein -- was he the one who said that it's a concept? It really is a concept. You can't wait for time. You have to make time. Make it happen for yourself because it is there if it's important. It really is.

Zibby: I try to say that about reading. I feel like I've gotten that in. When I talk to other people who say -- hence the name of the podcast -- we don't have time to read or this or that, I think about all the things we do make the time for every single day. Why? Why those things? It's not the same, necessarily, as a habit.

Jen: You're right, though. It's true. You get into the habit of surfing the internet for shoes or whatever you do. It's about the awareness. We just get stuck in these patterns of unaware -- they say that if you've got a job that you go to for eight hours a day, you actually spend about three hours of those days actually working. Then you're just screwing around the rest of the time. We spend a lot of time screwing around. Listen, I'm a big fan of screwing around and doing whatever you want to do, but if there's something you really want to do, you have time. You've just got to really make the time and consciously decide to make the time.

Zibby: Do you feel like you've put all this extra pressure on yourself now that you came out with a book about habits? Are there any habits that secretly you still haven't really nailed and now you can't admit it because the book is out?

Jen: You should do a podcast with my friends who see how I live my life. [laughter] Plus, we're in a pandemic. I am in my sweatpants right now. Totally, come on. Yes, I have absolutely succeeded at so many habits. I actually open the book in the introduction talking about, who the hell am I to write a book on habits? I still love fried food. Eat it all the time. I can coach you through. I know what to do. Whether I do it or not really doesn't matter as long as I tell you how to do it.

Zibby: I think it matters a little bit. Not that you have to hold yourself to that standard. Is this like a those who can't do, teach type of thing? [laughs]

Jen: Totally. No. My point in the beginning of the book was I am focusing on all the habits I suck at. Meanwhile, I have absolutely rocked some very hard habits for me to change. Nobody's perfect. We're all learning and changing and doing it.

Zibby: You've rocked the habit of becoming a best-selling author and writing more and more books. That's pretty cool. You're also doing these really awesome seminars, a $97 class to write a book proposal. I saw that all these people were selling books because of your coaching with them. That must make you feel amazing.

Jen: It's funny. I have a little pod here now with some people staying who fled the city. I was saying now I'm back on book tour because Habits has come out. I was like, god, and especially during the pandemic where I haven't left the house and I haven't done a damn thing. I'm just slothing around reading books, hanging out. That's right, there's this whole other world out there of the Badass people and all my readers. They're so amazing. It's been so nice to ramp that back up and be in that world and to remember that there is all this change going on and that people are just doing incredible things. It's so inspiring. It really, truly is.

Zibby: Wow, how great for you to help them, though. That's great. What is next in the Badass hopper? What are the next couple books? What's the plan?

Jen: You are a Badass at Taking Naps in Your Sweatpants. [laughter] You know, I don't know. I got to be honest. Each book is a birth. It's rather epic. I just birthed Badass Habits. I'm just going to enjoy my new little baby and celebrate it and parade her around and see what comes out of that and what I feel drawn to do next.

Zibby: The board game, that's what you're going to do. [laughs]

Jen: I will be contacting you to give you your ten percent when the board game comes out because that's such a good idea.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. One other thing that I thought was so great in the book was when you divided people about their boundary bungling, which is so great. I hated to even admit where I would fall short on this, as I'm sure most people reading the book would. You have too yes-y, too much no, and too control-y. You even have a huge section on if you're trying to launch a podcast about music and how you would have to put other things on hold. I literally was doing this, and obviously, this isn't about music, but I was like, she's talking to me. These are all the ways you have to make time in your life if you want to have a podcast. I'm looking around like, thank you. [laughs] Tell me about how important it is to maintain your boundaries when you're trying to form some habits.

Jen: I have to be honest. When we came up with this chapter for the book, I was talking to my editor and I was like -- I'm fifty-five now. When I hit fifty, man, I got so good at setting boundaries. All of a sudden, all these insecurities fell away. I was just kicking people out of my house and not inviting you to a party if I didn't want you to come. I don't care. I mean, not completely. We all have stuff to work through. It was so different. I really did. I remember my dad saying, "I don't know if you get older and wiser, or older and more tired." I was like, he's right. I don't have the energy to deal with people I don't want to deal with. I don't have the energy to say yes when I really want to say no. It's such a gift. I was like, I would love to write this so that the youngsters who don't -- you don't have to wait until you're fifty. You can actually start really becoming aware of your boundary issues and putting them into place and decriminalizing boundaries. I felt this was so important. When you set a solid boundary, you're not a mean person who's cutting off other people and not helping out other people.

You're actually informing them of what you're available for so that they know what to expect. Then you're not all caught up in this passive-aggressiveness and resentment and obligation and all those really fun things. It really serves everybody. No one's walking around on eggshells. I was super excited to write all that. Then I was talking to my editor. She was like, "Of course, for habits, if you're going to shift who you're being in the world, you're going to need totally new boundaries." You're going to have to set up boundaries around time that you need to implement these habits. You're going to be shifting who you are. If you are starting the habit of not drinking anymore, you are unavailable to go to bars with your friends. You are setting up that boundary. It's all about boundaries. It was really fun to write about this topic that I was so excited about and thrilled to be quite an expert on because I'm old and possibly very much more tired, but also to relate it to habits because I don't think that that comes into a lot of the books and discussions around habits. It's super important.

Zibby: I totally agree. It's more like complete behavior modification. It's an interpersonal coaching of finding what's important to you.

Jen: Exactly, and specifics and getting clear.

Zibby: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Jen: Let's see. Writing equals ass plus chair. That's the big mysterious equation to writing a book. It is about just staying. I'll tell you the thing for me. I am a really reluctant writer. I have to drag myself kicking and screaming. It's really painful for me, actually. I've heard that from a lot of writers too. I have a friend who can't wait to sit down to write. I'm just like, I hate you. She's actually my writing partner. She's always excited. I'm always trying to get out of it. That's another story. What I do is I chunk it down. Chunking down has saved my ass when it comes to writing books because I'm so squirmy and I so just, [makes noise]. What I do is I chunk it down into twenty-minute writing sessions where I am unauthorized to pee, to answer the phone, to go on the internet. Twenty minutes, I set an alarm. Then I'm allowed to have a ten-minute break or a five-minute break or whatever. I'm really serious about it because I know myself. I know by minute ten, I'm going to be squirming and coming up with excuses. Once I've set that timer, I know that it's not just about this twenty-minute writing session. This is about my career. This is about who I show up as in the world. I've got to get this done. Making that commitment is manageable for me. It's not the whole, I'm going to spend five hours writing today, which will be really a half hour. For me, chunking stuff down is extremely helpful. I highly recommend it.

Zibby: Excellent. That always helps. Isn't it like the whole quote, a journey of thousand miles begins with a single step? Something like that. I don't know.

Jen: Well done. You'll be done before you start if you start out with overwhelm. That's why that one day at a time is such a brilliant theory. It's just one day at a time. Just relax. We're so drama oriented.

Zibby: It's so true. Awesome. Thank you so much. I have loved our conversation. Your book was fantastic. I am going to keep it close by, especially during this holiday time when everything that is a problem becomes a really big problem. [laughter]

Jen: Thank you, holidays.

Zibby: Exactly. Thank you so much, Jen. Thanks for all your time.

Jen: Thank you. It was great talking to you.

Zibby: Have a great day. Buh-bye.

Jen: You too. Bye-bye.

Dr. Reshma Shah, NOURISH

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Reshma. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Reshma Shah: Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: Nourish, your book, The Definitive Plant-Based Nutrition Guide for Families, you open this book and say, why should there be another book? Don't we know everything about nutrition? What is your big answer to this question? Why take all the time for this plant-based nutritional handbook of sorts? Tell me about it.

Reshma: I think that we're at a really interesting time right now. People are really becoming open and so much more aware of issues that face us as a community in terms of everything that's been happening with COVID and with all the social justice movements. I think that people are really willing to look at the impact of their food choices. The reason that we wrote this book is because -- it's not a call for everyone to be vegan or for everyone to be perfect or for everyone to eat a perfectly clean diet, whatever that means. It's just really an invitation to look at our food choices and what the consequences of those might be. The reason that we focus on a plant-centered or plant-based approach to feeding our families is because research overwhelmingly supports a plant-centered diet as a foundation for promoting health. The first section of the book is all about the big why.

When you look at the added benefits of the impact that our food choices have on our environment and climate change and what we do with factory farming, in our opinion -- I cowrote the book with Brenda Davis who's a phenomenal plant-based dietician. In our opinion, a plant-based approach to feeding our families checks off all the boxes. It supports our health and the health of our family and our communities. It supports the health of our planet. We think of it of as a radical act of compassion when you think about the suffering that we inflict upon factory-farmed animals. Whatever we can do to address those issues is a win. Yes, there have been a lot of books on nutrition. Our perspective is really focused on families. It's focused on all these larger issues, but it's very much intimately connected to our dinner tables because it has to be practical, reasonable, and doable. I've got two kids. I know what it's like to have a busy household. It can't be just an academic discussion.

Zibby: How old are your kids?

Reshma: I've got a fifteen-year-old and an eighteen-year-old. Actually, soon to be sixteen. It's hard to believe how they grow.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. How did you convince them to adopt this? Have they adopted this? Has it been from day one? How did you do it?

Reshma: It's kind of been a full-circle experience for me. I'm Indian. I grew up in a vegetarian household. I grew up eating lots of lentils and beans and all these things, but I was a typical American kid. I definitely ate my share of hot dogs and hamburgers and all those things. All through medical school and residency training, I actually didn't really connect health and nutrition very much because, I'm sure many people can relate to this, doctors don't get a lot of training when it comes to nutrition. When I had kids of my own, that's when I really became interested nutrition and the role it played in our health because all of a sudden, I was responsible for these two young beings. I wanted to make well-informed food choices. The more I started learning about what sort of dietary approaches support health, I kept coming back to this plant-centered, plant-focused idea. One of the reasons I felt like I was very qualified to write this book is because I've made all the mistakes. I was a short-order cook. I did all the things at the dinner table that we ask parents not to do.

My family, in the beginning, I was super aggressive. It didn't really work very well. When you try and force things on people that you love and care about, they don't really enjoy that so much. My family was keen on letting me know. There was a period where I was super forceful. When I realized that it wasn't working, I kind of backed off. The single best thing I did to get my family on board was to -- I just kept cooking really good food. I didn't really focus on talking to them about, this is good for you. You should eat it. This is good for our environment. I just, over and over again, kept cooking good meals. Gradually, they sort of came on board. My daughter who's eighteen, she was vegetarian before any of us were. She was fully on board very quickly. My son and my husband came along much more slowly. Now I would say our household is ninety-five percent plant-based vegan. In the house, that's how I cook. Then we're out and if they want a pizza or an ice cream or something, I don't sweat too much about it.

Zibby: Wow. You're obviously a really good cook. The recipes that are in the back, are these your own? Where did these come from? Which one would you recommend? If I'm going to try to convince my kids to give away their chicken nuggets, I'm feeling like, I don't know, are they going to go for lemony chickpea pasta with mushrooms and broccoli? I don't know if my kids are going to do that. Molasses tahini energy balls, I would. I would do it.

Reshma: One of the things I always say is that this is a guidebook. We're providing you with the resources, but you are the expert of your family and your children. You're going to know what they like best. The recipes are mine and my coauthors. We have slightly different approaches. She's a grandmother. Her kids are out of the house. The way she cooks is going to be slightly different than what I cook because I've got two teenagers who are athletes. Our approach is going to be slightly different. Know your kids. One of the things I recommend is, start with the things that you think are going to be easy and approachable for your kids. Don't start with the hardest things first. If you've got kids that are really into chicken nuggets and that's a thing, you could try a tofu nugget. If you've got kids that are skeptical of tofu and it seems sort of strange, you might start with some of the veggie meats that might be a little bit more approachable. I also think that kids require repeated exposure. Even if they don't like it today doesn't mean they won't like it tomorrow. The more that we can use an approach, inviting them, including them, instead of sort of forcing it upon them, I think the easier it goes. For kids that are really, really picky, it might just be, instead of trying to take things away, that you're just adding things in. Serve whatever you normally serve, and then maybe you'll have a huge kale salad or maybe the lemony chickpea pasta as a side just so that they don't feel like you're forcing this on them.

Zibby: I know. I feel like we do that, and then -- my husband is actually the cook in our family. I can cook, but I have to follow recipes. Then if I deviate, something goes wrong. He'll just throw things together, and it tastes great. I feel like sometimes he'll spend all this time making it, and then none of the kids touch it. He's like, why bother? Why is he going to make the same thing again the next night? I'm like, fine, just give them whatever. [laughs] It's so easy to be discouraged as the person cooking.

Reshma: Yeah, because you spend a lot of time. You spend a lot of energy. You don't want the food to go to waste. One of the things that I did early on that helped us at the dinner table tremendously is -- my shopping day is usually Sunday. That's when I go to the market. That's when I do most of my menu planning. Before I would do all that work, I would ask them, what are your wishes for the week? I would get them involved in the menu planning. If they said, I don't really care, I don't have any wishes, the rule in our house is that I will try to honor your wishes, but once we're at the dinner table, you're not allowed to complain about the food.

Zibby: That's good. [laughs]

Reshma: I spend a lot of time making it. The other is, always try to have something at the table that you know your child is going to like. If you're trying a new vegetable, maybe pair it with their favorite pasta so that there's always something that they're going to enjoy at the table. That's not the time that you want to be arguing, bickering. The average American family spends seventeen minutes at the dinner table. Make those seventeen minutes count. That's a time for connection, enjoying one another's company. It's not the time to be battling about food.

Zibby: I feel like seventeen might be generous. I don't know if we make it seventeen minutes.

Reshma: That’s the average time. Some families are going to be a little shorter. That's the average time.

Zibby: Take me back a little to you and your career up until this point and your becoming a doctor and where you chose to specialize. I heard how this became another interest, but where did you start out?

Reshma: It's kind of a windy path for me a little bit. I, early on, knew I wanted to go to medical school. I can't tell how much of that is -- I definitely wanted to be in a helping profession. Growing up in an Indian community, becoming a doctor was definitely the path to success. I think that was kind of engrained in me. After medical school, I actually started out in obstetrics and gynecology. I did a year training in that and decided very quickly it didn't feel like the right fit. For me, when I don't know what to do in life, I always go back to school. I went back to school and got my master's in public health and then made a shift in pediatrics. It definitely felt like a much better fit for me. For quite a lot time, I'd say for the first fifteen years, I did general pediatrics. I worked in the emergency room. I had my own patients. I've worked with residents and students at Case Western and Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital in Cleveland. Then we moved to California about seven years ago. I decided I wanted to make a little bit of shift. I had done primary care for a long time. I've been working in the urgent care. It's a large medical facility that Stanford residents and medical students rotate through. I have been doing some teaching. Really, for the last six months or so with COVID, life has been so different. I've been focusing on finishing up the manuscript and getting the book out. For me, I really enjoyed teaching and working with the residents and students, but writing has become a passion I didn't even know I had.

Zibby: Wow. How did you learn how to write?

Reshma: I don't really know how I learned how to write. I never thought of myself as a writer. I think at the core of writing is really teaching. Teaching is something that I've always done in some capacity, whether it's working with medical students or residents. I've had the fortunate of doing some talks at Stanford. I think at the core of writing is really teaching. There's something that you feel you want to convey to people that can help them in their daily lives. That's been a long passion of mine. It just overflowed in writing. I was really lucky to have a writing partner. I cowrote this book. There was a lot of collaboration and sharing of drafts and back-and-forth and things like that.

Zibby: Amazing. How did you do that? I always wonder how collaborators collaborate. What system did you use? How did you assign the workload and everything?

Reshma: It's a really interesting story. My coauthor, Brenda Davis, this is actually her twelfth book. She's written many, many books before. When we decided to write this book together, I really drafted out the outline of it. We had certain sections that we were each going to work on. The first section is mine. The second section is her. The third is mine. Then the fourth was a combination. The way that we did it is, we would write a chapter at a time. I would send it to her. She would give me her feedback. It just kept going back and forth like that until we had it the way we wanted. It was really wonderful because I think we each have our own strengths and set of experiences. It was a really beautiful marriage of both our backgrounds, our experiences. We also had a very similar work ethic. I think a writing partner is kind of like a marriage. You don't exactly know what the relationship's going to be like. It ends up being a beautiful collaboration. She has become a true friend through the whole process.

Zibby: That's great. Put your pediatrician hat back on, if you will. Pretend you're talking to kids, my kids, my friends' kids, about the advantages of a plant-based diet for their health, not the environment and not about the animals, which both I think are easy for me explain and which they would get pretty simply, but in terms of what it actually does for you. Why should they give up these other things that they’ve come to like? What are the benefits?

Reshma: When we have these conversations with our children, I think it’s really important to be careful and tender because you don't want to be alarming. Especially in pediatrics, this whole conversation around pediatric obesity has become -- I feel like it's present in every exam room and every conversation. At the end of the day, I always try to focus on health and healthy habits instead of things like weight because that can be a really tricky conversation. One of the things I would say is, for kids, when you look at the longest-lived populations in the world, there are these areas called the blue zones. The blue zones are these geographical pockets throughout the world where they have the highest concentration of centenarians, so people that are living to age a hundred and beyond in fairly good health. They're still working in their garden. They're still part of their communities. All of these communities follow plant-centered diets as the foundation for their diet.

Following a plant-based diet can help you to reduce your risk of developing a lot of chronic diseases like heart disease, type two diabetes, certain cancers, even neurocognitive diseases like Alzheimer's and things like that. I think with those kids, though, those long-term effects can feel so far away. Kids who eat plant-based diets tend to have higher overall nutritional quality. They tend to consumer definitely way more fiber because plant foods are full of fiber. Animal foods contain no fiber. Also, a lot of protective phytonutrients. It gives them all the energy, the nutrients. Appropriately planned plant-based diets are safe for children during all stages of the life cycle. In terms of the specific benefits, there have been fewer studies done on children than there have adults. For instance, some of the health outcomes that we measure in adults in terms of hypertension and diabetes, we just don't see those as often in kids.

One of the culprits in kids' health that we've seen a lot is dairy. Dairy has been linked to increased incidents of colic in babies, constipation in children for sure, acne, and a whole host of other conditions of eczema and asthma and other atopic illnesses as well. Dairy is definitely something to consider. The way I approach it with children is I never say you have to eliminate these things. Let's say, for instance, your child has a lot of acne or has been really suffering with eczema or asthma. One approach could be, let's see how things go if we just eliminate it for two weeks. We don't have to do it forever. Let's just try for two weeks. Sometimes if they see enough of an improvement in their constipation or their asthma or their allergies, they will likely say, oh, yeah, there's so many alternatives, I will gladly forgo the dairy. I don't know if that answers what you were looking for with kids.

Zibby: It totally answered it. Yes, that's great. I feel like when I was little, I didn't quite realize that by shifting all the different levers of what pieces of nutrition I could adjust some of the things with my own body and my own health. I feel like now the focus is so much more in the weeds, not really weeds obviously. I could eat more avocado. I could eat more omega-3s in salmon. That will help my brain. This might help my hair. I just feel like it's important to convey all that. There are these little magic ingredients in every food. Maybe somehow making it seem like a treasure hunt for what your body needs or something like that.

Reshma: I think kids are definitely fascinated by that. If you have a child that's really inquisitive and really curious, I think those conversations can be a lot of fun. You just have to be careful because for some kids, it can cause more anxiety around food. Our whole goal as parents is to make it a joyful, inviting experience. Sometimes overcomplicating the message for children can create anxiety. You just have to know your kid. If your kid is really interested in these conversations, then go deep, as deeply as they want to go. The main focus should be on including a variety of foods. Eat the rainbow in terms of fruits and vegetables. Make sure that the food is really satisfying and tasty. Anyone can do something for a week. If you're in it for the long haul, it has to be enjoyable for kids and families and for adults too.

Zibby: Totally. Yes. Now that you've tapped into your love of writing as a form of teaching, what are you going to write about next?

Reshma: I have no idea. As a first-time writer -- I'm sure you've experienced this with other conversations you've had. You begin to wonder, this might be the only thing I actually have to say. I haven't really let this book fully percolate. We'll see. I would love to do more writing, whether it's as a book or even in other formats. I think it's a really wonderful way to be able to teach. I think it's a really powerful teaching method. This book has been -- it was two years in the making in terms of all the research. It's very evidenced based. We have tons of references at the end. I don't exactly know what I would want to write next, but I would love to continue to write.

Zibby: Maybe you should do a children's book version of it.

Reshma: That's actually a wonderful idea.

Zibby: Even all the colors on your cover, I'm looking, if you had it illustrated and you still called it Nourish. Maybe you have to find this leaf on every page. Make it like a little game. I don't know.

Reshma: That's actually a fantastic idea. I'd never even thought about it.

Zibby: There you go. Get right on that. [laughs] Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Reshma: I would say, for me, having a vision of what I wanted this book to be really helped. Our publisher was very open to a lot of our ideas. For instance, the cover of the book that they proposed, it just didn't fit my vision. I was fairly aggressive in saying, "I don't think this will work." I had to think outside the box. I found my own photographer. I said, "This is what I imagine. Do you think you can do this?" Once I presented the full photograph and everything to the publisher, they're like, "Oh, yes, this is beautiful. This works." I think having a vision of what you want the book to be and just being persistent but also collaborative.

Zibby: Totally. Great strategies. Awesome. I love whatever you did. I know I'm being ridiculous, but you should sell prints of just the photo. You could personalize. It's just such a great picture.

Reshma: I can share with you what the original cover was. You'll see why. I'll send you a copy of the original cover. Again, it goes back to having a vision of what you wanted the book to be. For me, more than anything, I wanted this book to be an invitation for families, not a, this is how you must do it. It's not meant to be prescriptive. It's really meant to be an invitation. I wanted the cover to reflect that.

Zibby: Love it. It is very inviting. Congratulations. Congrats on this book. Thanks for trying to help so many people live healthier, better lives, and the planet as a whole. It's a big mission that you've taken on. It's great. Thank you.

Reshma: Thank you. Thank you for the idea for the children's book. Now my brain is buzzing with all kinds of thoughts. It was such a pleasure chatting with you. Maybe I'll be back on once the children's book is done. [laughs]

Zibby: I would love it. Take care. Have a great day.

Reshma: Buh-bye. You too.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Sara Seager, THE SMALLEST LIGHT IN THE UNIVERSE

Zibby Owens: Sara Seager is a Canadian American astronomer and planetary scientist. She's a professor at MIT known for her work on extrasolar planets and their atmosphere. She's the author of two textbooks on these topics and has been recognized for her research by Popular Science, Discover magazine, Nature, and Time magazine. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013 citing her theoretical work on detecting chemical signatures on exoplanet atmospheres and developing low-cost space observatories to observe planetary transits. I really don't know what any of that means, but obviously she's super impressive. A graduate of the University of Toronto with a PhD from Harvard, she is also the author of memoir The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir, called a luminous memoir about how she had to reinvent herself in the wake of tragedy and discovered the power of connection on this planet as she searches our galaxy for another Earth.

Welcome. I'm so honored to be interviewing you today for "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks so much for coming on.

Sara Seager: Thanks for having me.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. The Smallest Lights in the Universe is perhaps one of my favorite books I've read recently. It is so good. The parallel lines of the space race with your own grief, it's just amazing. I just wanted to let you know how powerful I thought it was.

Sara: Thank you. I really appreciate that.

Zibby: For listeners who don't know what The Smallest Lights in the Universe is about, would you mind telling them what it's about? Then what inspired you to write this memoir?

Sara: The Smallest Lights in the Universe is about the journey of exploring outer space, but also the journey of exploring inner space. By outer space, I mean the stars. I hope you have a chance to look up at the dark night sky filled with stars because each one of those stars is a sun. We have evidence that each of them have planets. We're looking for another planet like Earth, one that might have life on it. By the way, I just wanted to capture in the book that science is truly a journey of exploration. Just like the people who first went to the North Pole or to Antarctica in the South Pole, we are trying to push the frontiers of exploration. All of us in our everyday life often eventually get to some kind of crisis. In my case, this was a death in my nuclear family of my first husband. It was like hiking in the outdoors and imagining falling off a cliff where at the bottom you're just broken and isolated. It feels like an incredible journey to have to make it back out of that lonely canyon. In my book, I interweave both of those stories. My goal is to just show people what science is like and how we can try to inspire ourselves to do big things.

Zibby: You're one of the most preeminent astrophysicists and have just really blown the records off of so many things, discovered new things, achieved things throughout the course of your career. Why a memoir too? Having read your story so I know how busy your life is, when did you find time to do this?

Sara: The whole thing started, actually, when my first husband died, which I can talk about now without being really upset about it because it was almost a decade ago. When I was going through this incredible journey of inner exploration, I just was like, wow, I haven't read about this or seen about it. I was so lucky to meet another group of moms, widows. I asked them, "Aren't you writing a book about this?" It seemed like something the world should know about. That was partly my motivation. It's funny because they say busy people can get more done. In my field, people are allowed to take a sabbatical. Every six years or so, you take some time off your everyday busyness. Repeatedly, those folks get less done on their own personal private work. I did have to squeeze things in on evenings and weekends. It was definitely tough.

Zibby: Wow, I'm very, very impressed. Your writing on grief, would you mind if I just read you this excerpt? Maybe you could comment on it. It has stayed with me so much. You write, "Everybody dies instantly. It's the dying that happens either quickly or over a long period of time." Then you go on and you say, "I understand intellectually the need for the distinction between dying and the instancy. A car accident and cancer are two different strains of death. It's the difference between dying as a whole all at once and dying piece by lost piece." Then you say -- I'm jumping around two pages because it's all so good. "Either way, the buildings end up gone, but the way it vanishes isn't the same, and we need a word to make clear the difference in process. It still felt to me as though Mike died instantly. Yes, we knew his death was coming. We could get his affairs in order, whatever hallow comfort that is supposed to bring, as though the most important thing when you die is that you die with a tidy desk." Then you say, "The dying time that Mike and I shared didn't make his death any less of a horror, and it didn't make my loss feel any less sudden. Mike took a breath, and then he died. He was alive, and then he wasn't. In one moment, I was a wife. In the next, I was a widow." That is so powerful. That's amazing. Tell me a little more about that difference and how it felt in that moment and this distinction that people tend to make as if the dying slowly will somehow blunt the trauma of having someone you love suddenly die.

Sara: I know. Now I do feel like crying.

Zibby: I'm sorry.

Sara: It's okay. What happened was he was diagnosed with cancer. He became terminally ill pretty quickly because the chemo didn't work. He definitely went on this downward slide where eventually he was bedridden. We both wanted him to die at home, so we had set up a hospital bed. We had home hospice. It was all very helpful. He was just hanging on like you wouldn't believe it. His home hospice nurse, Jerry, had explained to me what would happen and what to look for. Jerry would come back day after day, week after week, and go, "Wow, we haven't seen a forty-year-old man do this before. It's only the twenty-year-olds who have a brain tumor whose body is so strong they’ll hang on." I took care of Mike. I was just waiting for him to die because he was basically dead. He couldn't communicate. I was just taking care of him, helping him on that final journey. I honestly expected that I had come to terms with his death already because of those extended days and few weeks when he should've already been dead. He was just hanging on somehow. Then after he died, except for a short period of relief, my life just fell apart.

Zibby: I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for your loss. It's such a gift for you to be sharing it in this way.

Sara: One thing that I tried to convey in the book, I'm not wanting people to have a loss at this level, but sometimes a catastrophe can lead to new, beautiful things. Think about this. In the spirit of mixing science with personal, when the dinosaurs became extinct, we think a giant meteorite hit Earth and destroyed not only the dinosaurs' life, but lots of other species by creating just pure chaos in our atmosphere and enabling volcanoes to spew out ash. Everything became darker and probably a lot colder. Because of the dinosaurs dying out, new life could flourish, including what led to us humans being able to rise on our planet. Although as sad as my loss was with Mike, it definitely gave me new opportunities.

Zibby: That's a very healthy way of looking at it. There's the difference between what you know intellectually and then the feelings that you have when you're going through it. You know it might lead to something good. In the moment, as you described so well, it's hard to internalize. I'll just read one more quote on the grief. You wrote, "The tears ran down my face in steady streams. I knew intellectually that the widows were right. I needed to make forward progress. I couldn't spend the rest of my life drowning in grief. I had to kick my way back to shore. But when you lose someone, you don't lose them all at once, and their dying doesn't stop with their death. You lose them a thousand times in a thousand ways. You say a thousand goodbyes. You hold a thousand funerals." Now I'm crying, oh, my gosh. Oh, this book. Tell me a little more about that passage.

Sara: As you go through grief and life starts to rebuild, there are, sometimes constantly, other time occasionally, striking reminders that you've lost your loved one. You're going along. I was taking my kids somewhere to stay overnight. I was still really depressed back then. Just seeing the happy families or going to take my two boys to soccer where it's all coached by mostly soccer dads and seeing all these healthy dads supporting the boys, you just feel the loss all over again, again, and again.

Zibby: I wish there was some way to make sure that didn't happen. I think that's part of why grief is so unpredictable. It comes and clocks you on the head when you are least expecting it even if you're having a good day, and then something happens.

Sara: It's so true.

Zibby: The widows of Concord, I felt like that could've been a name for a book as well, the widows of Concord. That's such a perfect thing. I loved how your sons got so into it that at one point when you started dating, one of your sons said, "No, you can't get married again because then we'll be out of the widows group." [laughs] I know you touched on this earlier, but tell me just a little more about the power of getting involved in a group like this. I know you were so initially resistant thinking everybody was in much better shape and all the rest. The power of being with people in a similar spot, tell me how that worked for you.

Sara: It was just an incredible experience, honestly. When I talked about how death could give rise to beautiful things, this small group of women in my town -- my town only has about twenty thousand people. There were six, and then we had one woman from a neighboring town. What was amazing is that at least for the first couple years, our mindsets were all so similar. Admittedly, we're of the same kind of demographic. We all had kids ranging in age from about four years old to thirteen at the time. It was amazing with these women because they didn't judge. No matter what our differences were, our widowhood, our fresh grief was so common that it brought us together. The widows were so funny. You don't really associate humor with grief, but you kind of have to counterbalance the huge depths of despair. These women had a shocking sense of dark humor. The stuff we joke about -- sometimes we were in situations where there'd be other people who weren’t widows, and you should've seen the way they looked at us. We got together really regularly on the so-called "important" holidays like Father's Day, Halloween, Valentine's Day. Then we'd meet for coffee where our first topic would be how to stay afloat financially. I was the only working widow at the time, but it's still tough, actually. Then the second topic, equally treacherous, was on dating because you've got a lot of baggage. Any single person at that age usually has some baggage, but I feel like we had more heavy baggage.

Zibby: Wow. I love the continuous proof that there are beautiful things that come out of this, and your friendships. I know you wrote a lot in the book about your difficulty finding your crew, basically, in the past and how you were almost relationship-averse, that is was a fluke that you fell in love with your husband and that you could connect in that way. Do you feel like now this has opened you up to all new kinds of friendships, or are you just committed to your widows' group and that's kind of it?

Sara: Oddly enough, the widows' group kind of dispersed. We had a lot in common for the first couple of years, but we all went back to our new normal. The moms whose kids are in college now, they're doing different things than those of us who still have kids in high school. People seem to get busy with their own hobbies. Ironically, we started meeting again. They had a socially distanced outdoor book party for me. I gave each widow a copy of the book. We're at least planning to start meeting regularly again, but we'll see how those go. I try to be open to new experiences.

Zibby: That's amazing. Let's talk a little bit about your really unbelievable and inspiring career. I had never really read anything about what it's like in this industry, and especially as a woman in this industry, and all the discoveries and how people doubted your research at first. Yet you kept at it. Your HuffPost article when you were pointing out to people who didn't realize it that the demands of having to meet, say, quarterly in person is really tough for a working mom who lives across the country. Tell me a little more about how you keep finding the resilience and the confidence to just keep plunging forward into literally the biggest unknown there could possibly be in the universe and not letting the naysayers and the setbacks throw you off course.

Sara: There's a few different things. One is, I've always loved exploring. I grew up in Canada where canoeing is a thing. We don't have mountains in Eastern Canada. If you're going to take up an outdoor sport, it's going to be something other than mountain climbing. We would go canoeing and do big, adventurous trips in the north of Canada. I feel like science has that same spirit of, wow, wanting to do something new. Don't you hate it when you want to do something new, whether it's small or big, and someone says, you're never going to be able to do that? Has that happened to you?

Zibby: Yes.

Sara: How does that make you feel?

Zibby: Actually, it happened with this podcast.

Sara: There you go. Doesn't it make you feel angry, like, I'm going to do it, I don't care what you say?

Zibby: Yeah, to spite them. It's like, well, watch me go. [laughs]

Sara: This fuels the fire if someone says, no, I don't think that's a good idea. I think a lot of people share that feeling. Finally, I do have a specific visualization tool to do this. I do share this with younger women I work with. It's very common in my field to have the imposter syndrome where you think you don't belong and you don't have belief in yourself. What I tell them I also do myself. I try to focus viscerally on my past accomplishments to give myself that inner confidence that I can succeed at anything. How many times as women or moms or whatever are we always kicking ourself or berating or just saying, I could've done that better? How many times do you say -- this is what I tell my kids -- I did the best job I could with the skills I have? Then how many times do we say, wow, I did a great job? Never, right?

Zibby: Yeah. [laughs]

Sara: We should be spending as much time or more being proud or being complimentary to ourselves as being hard on ourself. I feel like doing those things consciously really helps me reach my goals.

Zibby: It's funny. Someone who had helped me do something asked afterwards how it had gone. I typed in a text, "I did a really good job." Then I sat there with the phone in hand and the cursor blinking being like, should I delete that? That sounds terrible. Then I was like, well, I feel like I did do a good job. I want to thank this person and let them know that I didn't let them down. There's all this inner critic not allowing ourselves to say that things went well. You're right. How much better off would we be if our inner voices were constantly encouraging rather than discouraging us?

Sara: Yes, I really, really think that's important. As a mom, I know my kids wanted -- I don't know if this is going to sound good or bad, but my kids wanted me to be more nurturing. One of them would always say, "Mom, moms make chocolate chip cookies. Moms do this. Moms do that." Instead of feeling bad, I would just say, "You know, I don't do that. But you know what? Even though I don't make cookies, we do all these other things." It is praising ourselves, but it's also not beating ourselves up for something that isn't who we are.

Zibby: That's true. That's such a good idea to show that to the kids. Otherwise, they’ll think they can do everything. It's impossible, so why set them up for failure?

Sara: One time, this big tree branch had fallen on our garage. I had to get rid of it. I remember my kids expressing doubt that I could do it. One of the widows had come over very fashionably dressed in leather pants and the high-heeled boots with a chainsaw and instructions on how to use it. I decided not to use the chainsaw because I wasn't totally sure I could do that safely. That's the widows empowering each other. I did have a handsaw. I sawed it, sawed it, sawed it. Finally, it came down. It was so heavy. Honestly, I could've really got hurt. You know how heavy even a tree branch is? So heavy. I jumped out of the way just in time. That helped the kids because they were skeptical I could actually take care of that.

Zibby: Wow. I feel like a chainsaw is one of those things you should not be reading instructions for. [laughs] It should come with some required training instead of a YouTube video. Oh, my goodness. So how long did it take you to write this book? I know you said you did it in found time, basically. What was it like going back and reliving all those emotions again?

Sara: It took a few years to write. It was definitely cathartic. It was incredibly emotional at times. Wow, I would just cry my eyes out sometimes, but it was a good feeling, really good.

Zibby: Would you want to write another book on any topic?

Sara: Maybe someday, yeah. It was one of those things that brought -- there was a creative process and narrative process, a storytelling process. It was definitely a lot work, though. I had a fantastic team set up by the publishers. Once the first draft is done, the book is only half done, actually, because they come back and reorganize it or say, do this, do that, do that, do that, total reorg. That happens two or three times, actually. Then the editor will go through it with a finer tooth comb. Finally, we had this absolutely outstanding copy editor. That's the person who's just checking for grammar. That person went so far above and beyond and would say, "This sentence makes no sense because a few paragraphs before you said this." It's not just the writing itself. As you know, the publishing process took way longer than I ever expected.

Zibby: Your publisher is Crown, right?

Sara: Crown. Right.

Zibby: That's great. Not everybody has such a great experience with their editors and publishers and everything, so I'm glad that that worked so well. A lot of people do, but not everybody.

Sara: I think I was of the mindset that they know more, so I should just do whatever they say. I did push on a few -- there's a few specific sentences they really didn't like because they weren’t literal. They were just figurative. There's one where we're describing this incident at one of our widows' get-togethers. One of them is telling us this crushing story that her husband who had died of cancer, the day before he started chemo, she had found in his pile of stuff, he had bought tickets to go to Paris.

Zibby: That was such a sad part.

Sara: Airplane tickets and hotel. He never told anyone because it was a bet against cancer. People do these defiant things. My own husband, he never cared about good clothes. His one and only suit was given to him by his father who happened to be the same size and who had worn it for a few decades. For some reason when my husband was terminally ill, he went out and bought a brand-new suit. Does that make any sense? It's defying against that prediction of death. She found all of this, literally, I think it was just a few days -- she found all of this stuff. The date on the ticket was a few days after he had died. When I wrote this part in the book, it's one of my favorite sentences in the book because the kids were just playing and they didn't notice that we widows were telling this story and crying. It ends the paragraph saying, it's something like, Paris was in full flood. That means we were crying so much about this trip to Paris. The editing team didn't want that sentence because it doesn't make sense, really. We were crying, but we're not in Paris and there's no flood. It's just so poetic. Rarely did I really push back. I think my experience was good because I mostly just did whatever they requested. By the way, the widow in question, later on in her life she actually did manage to take her two kids to Paris and had a great time.

Zibby: Aw, that's such a great coda -- is that the right word? -- to the story. That's amazing. I know your kids must be older by now. I know how old they were in the book. Seventeen or something?

Sara: That's right. The older boy is seventeen. The younger one is fifteen.

Zibby: Have they read your story? Have you shared it with them? How do you feel? No?

Sara: I actually asked them not to read the book until they are adults, like twenty-one, because it's pretty upsetting. Kids, actually, are resilient. People have died, parents have died for millennia. Kids get over it. I really believe having gone through this with not only my own kids, but watching my widows friends' kids as well, that in order to be resilient kids brains are designed to forget. A lot of the details in the book, they won't remember. It might be upsetting for them. A couple other things, before I submitted the book or at some stage, I told them everything that was in the book about them. In one case, I toned something down because the kid requested it. It's the opening where he has the meltdown on the sledding hill. He thought it sounded worse than it actually was. I went through just as a courtesy because I didn't want them being embarrassed by anything that was in the book. Then another thing was that one of them, after I said, "Look, I think you shouldn't read this until you're twenty-one --" You know how kids push back. If you say you should read it, they’ll never read it. If you say don't read it, they’ll want to read it. He just said, "Mom, if everyone else in the world gets to read it, isn't that kind of weird that your own kids who are in the book aren't supposed to read it?" I said, "Sure. Okay, fine." We go by logic. If my kids have a logical argument, I don't say, no, you can't do it because I said. I always respond to logic. I'm like, "You could, sure. I'm not going to prevent you from reading it, but I just want you to know that sometimes things aren't as upsetting to people if it's not about them personally."

Zibby: That's true. What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Sara: Let me think for a second. I do have a piece of advice that someone gave me early on. For your story, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, there has to be an arc to the story. This might sound obvious, but it's really harder to implement than it sounds. There has to be a start and an end, but also a rise and a fall and then a rise. In a mystery novel, there's a plot. Something happens. The characters are trying to solve the mystery. They can't solve the mystery at the beginning or there's no book. They have to solve it towards the end, but not right at the end. It's the same thing. Whatever the story is, and the narrative, there has to be an arc to it.

Zibby: Interesting. One of the things I loved about your book is the way you used time and how you went back and forth in time and how you structured each chapter. However it is you did it, it really worked well in propelling the narrative arc forward. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time.

Sara: Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me on your call.

Zibby: I absolutely loved your book.

Sara: I wanted to just say, I know your mother-in-law died. It must have been a really crazy few weeks. I'm sure it's tough.

Zibby: Thank you. Honestly, your book really helped. It's one of the things that helped the most, so thank you.

Sara: You're welcome.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Sara: Bye.

Sydney Sadick, AIM HIGH

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Sydney. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Sydney Sadick: Thanks for having me. I'm so excited, the queen of books.

Zibby: [laughs] The queen of fashion.

Sydney: Thank you.

Zibby: Aim High, your new book, please tell listeners what this book is about and what inspired you to write this book.

Sydney: I host a lot of fashion segments for shows like the Today Show, E!, Inside Edition. Once my segments ended, I would get hundreds of DMs on Instagram from women of all ages ranging from teenagers to women in their sixties saying that they needed more. They wanted more fashion advice. They wanted to know about confidence. They had all these questions that they couldn't get answered in my six-minute segment. That was where the idea came from. How can I expand on what people already know of me in a place that you can constantly go back to and learn more? Aim High is really that place. It's a go-to read for motivational advice on fashion tips, but also how to bring out your confidence from within. I always say that confidence is an accessory that never goes out of style. It's just as difficult of something to bring out as much as developing your own personal style. Those two things really come together. It's also to explain how the way that you dress can affect your mood. It helps you achieve the goals that you want out of life. I know for myself throughout quarantine, I was living in sweatpants at the beginning. I was very unmotivated. I was very depressed by everything going on in the world. Then I realized, wait a minute, if I want to shift my view and my mindset, I need to start dressing like the girl I used to be. Now I put on my makeup. I put on structured pants. I wear a fitted top. I am like the original me. This whole notion of aiming high is something I think that's even more relevant today because of the pandemic. We all need that positivity and that emphasis on self-care. That goes right down to what we wear.

Zibby: I am totally impressed that you're dressing up in your home every day. That's amazing. I love it. It's inspirational. I need to take a piece of that. I have these three sweatpants that, actually, I learned about from Real Simple magazine. They did an inventory of the best joggers. I was like, ooh, I'm kind of tired of my sweatpants, so I ordered those sweatpants. Every day, I'm like, light grey, dark grey, black, light grey. [laughs]

Sydney: They're comfortable. I get it. If you could see on the side of our Zoom screen right now, I have six pairs of sweatpants that are just sitting on the side. I say those are for after hours. That's what I can change into once I'm done with the work that needs to be done. That's just my own way.

Zibby: That's great. I do dress up sometimes because it does make me feel good. It's absolutely true. When you feel better, you even eat better. It's this whole ripple effect. Yes, I totally understand. I loved how in the book you gave a whole example at the beginning when you were trying to help a woman dress for three weddings in a week. You ended up finding this magic item I'd never heard of before that morphs into fifty-seven different things. You could see her confidence really coming out. She really owned that outfit and the accessories that you found. You are the best shopper ever. You don't spend that much money. You get a hundred different things. You make all these different outfits. Then the end result, of course, is this super confident person who can waltz into the wedding feeling really great. I thought that was such a great opening story that you included.

Sydney: Thank you. That was definitely one of the memorable moments of the last few years. It was my first real creative segment on Hoda & Jenna where I got to really create a concept and have someone, a viewer, be changing on live television as we went. We had a little mini-dressing room for her with a curtain. She ran back and forth. The dress, which was called the convertible wrap dress, was being wrapped around a million different ways. It was a whole situation. This woman, Eileen, was just so excited. That was the moment I realized, too, it doesn't matter where you live in the country. We live in New York, so we're surrounded by fashion constantly. This was a woman who lived in a very suburban town outside of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania where it just wasn't part of her life. She didn't even care. This is a moment where she realized, wait a minute, there is something to be said here. I actually do like fashion. It just took me a moment to figure it out. I think it happens for every woman at a different point in life.

Zibby: Tell me again the story, and you included it in your book, of your complete go-getter-ness from your Harvard summer program to launching a blog to becoming you, working all through college. This is insane. Just give us a little more color into all of that.

Sydney: I think a lot of moms will relate to this when you have a child who maybe is super shy, is maybe afraid of going to summer camp or doing the traditional things that all of the kids on the Upper East Side or even other states are doing. I was just never that girl to leave my family and go away even on a sleepover. I was just very attached to my mom and probably still am a little bit. My parents were like, "Sydney, if you want to go to a college that's outside of New York, how are they going to think that you're ready for that, these schools? They know that you haven't done anything that's outside of your box." I said, "You're right." My mom brought up the idea of Harvard summer school. My aunts had gone. This is years ago. We have a big age gap between us. She told me that she had this amazing experience. I was like, if she did it and she's a homebody, then maybe I could get into it. I applied and got in. When I went to go and select the courses that were available to me, the two that really sounded the most appealing, and for no other reason than the descriptions, were in journalism. I signed up for these two classes with all Harvard professors. I was the youngest person in my classes because for some reason it was more targeted towards grad students, but they let me in. I was just sixteen.

For the first assignment for one of the classes, they said, "You need to come back in the next day and start your own blog. Write about whatever you want." This is in 2010. Instagram in nonexistent. The word WordPress is this new term that people are just trying to figure out what that even means and what you can do with it. My dorm room was coincidentally the dorm room that Mark Zuckerberg was in, Lowell House, years ago. I create this blog. I'm like, you know what, if I'm going to write about something, it needs to be what I know. I had a very stylish mom. I had a very stylish grandmother. I can write about fashion. I come up with the name Style Solutions. I start posting my outfits like you see of traditional fashion bloggers today. It was becoming wildly read across this summer program for whatever reason. When I got back to New York, I was like, I don't want to give this up. I could totally see this becoming a brand. I said, but it needs to be different. I can't just be posting my outfits. It doesn't have enough depth for me. In addition to the digital skills I learned at this program, I said I wanted to really take the reporting skills that I learned in the other class that I was taking that summer, and I said I want to start interviewing celebrities. At sixteen years old, you don't really know how you're going to make that happen.

Conveniently, the New York Post has, always, these great little stories and advertisements. There was an ad for Rhianna who was going to be launching her debut book at Barnes & Noble, which is ironic. Life is so funny like that. It all comes around. I got my school to let me to leave class early. I changed in the middle of Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street out of my little uniform, put on whatever clothes I had. I wait in this line for three hours. I was the last person. I swore Rhianna was going to leave. I was just begging the team I saw around. I'm like, "Is she going to stay? Is she going to stay?" She stayed. I got up to her. I said, "Instead of just signing my book with your name, can you please write down your favorite fashion accessory?" I didn't know if she was going to do it. I couldn't see. There was so much room between me and her at the table. I have the book here. I look at it sometimes. She wrote it down. She said it was scarves. I was able to turn that quote into an article and say "Rhianna reveals her favorite fashion accessory" and recapped her best moments in scarves. The article blows up. It gets ten thousand unique people in that first hour.

Zibby: I thought it was hair accessories. I could've sworn you said something else. Wasn't it hair accessories? It had two words. There were definitely two words in it.

Sydney: It could've been changed to hair accessories because she used the scarves as turbans across her hair. It was a combination, but she really meant scarves, is what she meant. We wrote that in the book, but I think it was more leaning towards scarves because she always wore them across her head.

Zibby: Got it. Okay, sorry. [laughs]

Sydney: Good catch of detail. She wrote this down. The article blew up. That was the moment where I was like, if I can get Rhianna to talk about something, then I should be able to ask many more celebrities. From there, I got an internship at the Daily Front Row, went to GW for college in school of media and public affairs, freelanced for them throughout college, and interned for Rachel Zoe, Oprah Magazine, all of which kept my feet wet. I became an editor as soon as I graduated for the Daily until I left two years later to pursue being on air. It's been a ten-year journey. People are like, you're so young, you're so young. I feel old because it's been going on for so many years.

Zibby: Is that your dream, the on-air component of your life? Do you want to have your own show? It sounds like that's where this is going, that one day you're going to have your own fashion show on Bravo or something. Is that where you're headed?

Sydney: Definitely. You know what? Fashion has been my core. It's been the base of what I've done. Because of it and then what I've also been doing, other things throughout quarantine, it's opened the conversation to talk so much more about fashion. I love fashion as a way to get into someone and to just talk about fun things, but I'm really interested in expanding that and really having conversations beyond fashion too, but how to mold these different categories together.

Zibby: Very cool.

Sydney: But a show, yes.

Zibby: [laughs] Now it's so great, though, because you can just turn on your camera, and you have a show. It's so disintermediated, if that's even the right word.

Sydney: And that's all you.

Zibby: You don't even need the network. It's better because you get a bigger audience right away, but you can test it out.

Sydney: That's what I've been actually doing throughout quarantine. I started a daily Instagram Live show. We bring on different celebrities and designers every day. Sometimes I think the views are so crazy that it might be just as much as what people are watching on television. Media is changing so much. I think people really want that accessibility. You do your Instagram Lives too. Your fans and audience can ask questions as they go. They feel engaged and involved. I think we all want to feel less alone right now. That whole notion of community is so important.

Zibby: Totally. You're right. Of course, you have your Instagram Live show. I'm sorry, I should've thought to say that.

Sydney: No, that's okay.

Zibby: Let's go back to the fashion specifics for two seconds to the aforementioned moms who are in their sweatpants, perhaps me, most of the time. What changes are within our grasp that are not so hard to implement that can make us feel better?

Sydney: By the way, if you're good in your sweatpants, don't change out of it. If that's what makes you feel comfortable and good right now, leave the sweatpants as your base and go for it a little more in the other elements of your wardrobe. When you're doing all these Zoom talks, and I'm sure a lot of moms are doing school conferences or they will be soon, it's really about focusing on the upper portions of our bodies and how we can make a statement from the waist up. An easy way to do that is to throw on a statement pair of earrings like a hoop, a chain necklace, something that just adds a little bit of glamor and boldness without trying too hard. It doesn't take that much effort. Layering is also something that is really easy to do. You have a T-shirt. Then you could throw on a little blazer. I think blazers are a little stiff when we're at home. It's a little hard for me to even do that. A really crisp cardigan always works really well. Going for some color or even a pattern, just a way so when people are looking at you, it brightens things up a bit. That's also really easy. I think it's totally fine to stick with your comfortable silhouettes. It's just about going for them in a little bit more of a fashion-forward way.

Zibby: Mind you, I know this will be on YouTube and on the podcast. For the people who are not watching this on YouTube, to see our outfits right now, Sydney is wearing this little white T-shirt, very cute, with a gold -- oh, there's a little heart on it. Her gorgeous, long, looks-like-it-must-be-fake-because-it's-so-gorgeous hair is covering it with a chain gold necklace and giant hoop really thick earrings and full-on makeup and whatever. I am wearing a black T-shirt under a black long sleeve T-shirt with my kid's school lanyard around my neck and my hair in a ponytail. I actually put makeup on, so this is better than it could've been. I'm not in my pajamas, which is also great. I'm not even in sweatpants today. I'm in new leggings. [laughs]

Sydney: [Indiscernible] are different. I'm single. I don't have a family. I don't have the responsibility other than myself. Like I said before, it depends on where you are in life. Your priorities shift. I don't know what I'm going to be like, but this is me right now in my twenties who doesn't have anyone to worry about but me. That's the truth. It's different for you and for a lot of moms.

Zibby: Thank you for letting me off the hook in that gentle way. [laughs] What about your sourcing of inexpensive, really cute, make a big pop items that you seem to find for all the people on TV?

Sydney: For me, I do better in Zaras and Forever 21s than I would ever do in luxurious label brands like a Gucci or [indiscernible]. I don't really feel comfortable with those brands. It's fun to have a splurge handbag or a shoe. In terms of clothing, I don't think that's where women should be spending thousands and thousands of dollars. I just personally don't see the value. You can find great quality clothing in stores like Zara. One of my favorite websites is called the Verge Girl. It's kind of the new Nasty Gal.

Zibby: Wait, I'm writing this down. Say it again.

Sydney: Verge Girl. Some of it looks, I'm just warning you, a little juvenile when you go to the homepage, but the quality is so strong. You need to sift through it and find those pieces like their oversized sweaters. It's such good quality. Everything is around a hundred dollars. It works. I don't believe in spending a lot of money, also, on trends.

Zibby: A hundred dollars is a lot for a sweater. Keep taking me lower and lower. [laughs]

Sydney: You can go lower too, but in terms of a high-quality cashmere [indiscernible] sweater, between eighty and a hundred dollars. Compared to going to Bloomingdale's, they're never going to be under a hundred ever. Forever 21, sites like that, you can find pieces under fifty dollars that are amazing. I never put anything over fifty dollars on my segments ever. It's always under fifty. Places like Old Navy; I love the jeans and jeggings from American Eagle. I think they're so flattering. They fit on all women.

Zibby: Yes, my daughter just told me about American Eagle. We got her some clothes. They're amazing. I was like, I think I have to order from here. I was unexpectedly wowed by American Eagle. That read like an ad. It was not an ad. This actually happened.

Sydney: None of these are ads. They're just opinions. Lulus is another great site, tons of pieces under fifty dollars that are so fun.

Zibby: Lulus?

Sydney: Lulus is [indiscernible] only.

Zibby: To be honest, I do not like to spend money on clothes at all and don't very often. I like to spend money on books. I do also feel like it's important to look put together. I always hear my mother's voice in my head. Come on, pull yourself together. Wear a cute outfit.

Sydney: It really is not about spending money. That's what I try to explain to people. Style don't equal a price tag. It's just a mindset. The first place that I always suggest shopping first is your own closet. People always say to me on Instagram, you have so many clothes. Yes, brands send me clothes every single week. I'm very, very lucky. But half the time, I'm re-wearing the same pieces every week. You can't even tell because I'm just styling it in a way that tricks everyone from not realizing. They think it’s a new outfit, but it's not. It's just developing that craft and knowing what looks good on you and what you like and then mixing and matching. That way you don't feel like you have to go shopping. I never really feel like I have to shopping, nor do I really want to at this point. That's not what's as important to me right now.

Zibby: What do you think is going to happen to all the designers and everybody if nobody ever goes to events anymore? I opened my closet. I have a few really fancy dresses. I was like, oh, I wonder if I'll ever wear these again. Then I was thinking, what about all the people who make all these fancy dresses? Their whole business model, they must have been doing great. I sound like a moron. Obviously, I know that the economy has been hit in basically every possible sector, but I just happened to be thinking about high-end formal wear companies and what's going on with them.

Sydney: It's so true. I've been in the Hamptons since March. I've gone back to the city twice. When I went back most recently -- I had my rack of clothing which is where I would usually keep the clothes I would wear that week. I was going to tons of events, and I just had to stay organized. That rack is full of the clothes that I was supposed to wear the week that the city shut down. I saw this gorgeous periwinkle sequin blue gown I was supposed to wear to the [indiscernible] museum for their young adults' party that I was on the committee of. I'm like, am I ever wearing that again? A lot of designers have had to shift their focus. Jonathan Simkhai is now doing total ready-to-wear very cool just leggings and T-shirts, the most causal I've ever seen him. Michael Costello, when the pandemic first hit, he stopped making his gowns and just transitioned to making masks with his million-mask initiative to give masks to frontline workers in LA and in other cities. He was one of my first guests on my Lunchtime with Sydney show. He actually brought us into the back where we could see these masks being made, which was super cool. Christian Siriano, he's definitely doing a little bit more licensing deals, I can see, with different companies. I think they're all trying to just figure it out. I really hope that we will be able to go to events. I think it's just going to take time. Especially for my generation, millennials, they don't like that notion of waiting. I read like crazy, these articles. Time magazine just did an article comparing the pandemic to the Spanish flu. It literally did a side-by-side. To me, it says another year's going to be washed. When things do hopefully normalize in some capacity, we're all going to have to have a really big coming-out party. Everyone's going to have to just be decked out in their best outfits ever and make up for the last two years.

Zibby: Exactly. What's coming next for you? Do you have any idea? Where are things going? You're doing your own show, basically. You have this amazing book that just came out. Now what? What's in the next year? What's your planning?

Sydney: Planning is the one thing, as such a controlling person, that I can't really do right now. I think a lot of women, and men, are struggling with that. We're not really in control of our futures. I've kind of taken a step back and realized that I can't plan. My goal before the pandemic was to work for a specific network. I thought I was moving to LA and this was all happening. Then I was like, that can't even be my goal now because that's not the focus of viewers. Media and fashion, they're both changing so much right now that it has to be a very fluid situation. The one thing I can control is myself. This Lunchtime with Sydney show is something I fully have control of. I do everything. I host. I book. I produce. I'm loving that hands-on-ness that I'm able to have right now because it makes me fulfilled. I am continuing to build that out. I host Instagram Lives on Fridays for the Today Show's new millennial platform called Tomorrow by Today, which is a very similar concept to what I started on Lunchtime with Sydney. Continuing to focus on the book and just doing fun events and trying to do virtual things with my followers because I really want people to take COVID seriously and to stay home as much as they can and wear their masks. My generation is just so out of touch in a lot of ways with how to deal with this. I'm trying to set a good example. It's easier said than done, but I'm really trying. And hopefully more products. I launched an Aim High hoodie with my book. It was a collaboration with [indiscernible] brand, [indiscernible]. It sold out within twenty-four hours. I want to continue to release products to make people feel good and that's accessible to everyone.

Zibby: That's a great idea. Awesome. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors having just written a book?

Sydney: Listen, I've never given birth, but I feel like it must sort of be like the equivalent mentally of giving birth to a baby because you're putting something out into the world. I went to school for journalism, so I wrote. I've written my whole life. For me, that wasn't really hard. It's just about coming up with an idea and how it can be different. We're in such a world where there are so many people who are so good at the same kind of skills. It's about our perspectives that make us different. It's about finding that niche and what makes your voice a little different from the rest. I think it's just figuring that out, writing a lot of lists. You would give way better advice than I would. I'm sure you have a great method.

Zibby: You know what? Everybody I ask has something a little bit different to say. It's just so neat. It reflects their personality. I just like hearing. Make lots of lists, I don't anyone has said that before. There you go.

Sydney: Post-it notes everywhere. I tried to clean up for you today.

Zibby: [laughs] Thank you. Sydney, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Congratulations on your book. I can't wait to see where you end up going in life. You're like a little shooting star. We'll see what happens.

Sydney: Thank you so much. I so appreciate that.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Sydney: Bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Ann Shen, NEVERTHELESS, SHE WORE IT

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Ann, to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for talking about your book, Nevertheless, She Wore It: 50 Iconic Fashion Moments.

Ann Shen: Thank you so much for having me, Zibby. I'm so excited to be here.

Zibby: This book was so awesome. I couldn't even decide which I found most interesting, some of the current-day fashion trends or all the ones from back in the day, the invention of the bikini or when pants were a big deal and all of that stuff. How did you come up with all of these different fashion moments? What is the bigger story behind assembling them all together?

Ann: Oh, my gosh, that's such a good question. I love fashion and style. I love it as a way that we can express ourselves. I was thinking about all the ways that people who are very much in the public eye are aware of that, and especially women who historically have been a group that haven't always had a voice, are aware that people are always looking at what they're wearing. Then there have been people who use that as a way to deliver a message. That's kind of the theme that I started with. A lot of the time, the message was a way to give women more of a voice, a place, power, more liberation. I looked for examples in history that started evolving styles, but in ways that were for women to feel more empowered. Narrowing it down to fifty moments was really difficult because there's so many fun styles, interesting styles to talk about and the history behind everything. I really tried to either trace the lineage of styles, because they evolve through time, to, where did this come from? What did it mean at the time? And then moments that were very politically or news-groundbreaking that we still remember even now that are tied to a message like Lady Gaga's meat dress or Hillary Clinton's white suits.

Zibby: You mentioned in the beginning of the book how things really changed after the Industrial Revolution. What happened? What happened then?

Ann: Before then, all clothes are handmade, literally by hand. Most people didn't own a lot of clothes. The Industrial Revolution created factories that then were able to create garment mills and sewing factories and make clothing more accessible, meaning more affordable, to everyone besides the upper class. The only people who had real costumes or changes were people who were royalty or who were very, very famous or well-off. Once the Industrial Revolution happened and everybody was able to get clothing, they were able to have a bigger wardrobe to express themselves, to have more of a say in how they wanted to present in the world versus, here are the few dresses that my mom made and have handed down, or that I made. That made style a more accessible choice to everyone as a way of personal expression.

Zibby: It's funny because I don't really think about what I wear that much. I'm not very stylish. I'm not really into fashion so much. My clothes don't make a statement. If they fit, it’s a good day. I know what I like. My main criterion is, does this hide the places that need to be hidden right now? That's how I dress. I realize for all the women in here, everybody, not everybody, but most people were trying to say something or do something, or maybe inadvertently, like Michelle Obama with the sleeveless shift dress or Serena Williams with her tennis catsuit. Were they all trying to make such a message? Even Elizabeth Hurley, how you point out how she created an influencer at all, really. How intentional do you think most of these current-day moments were? Did they mean to create such a stir? Maybe it just varies.

Ann: That's such a good question. I want to go back to you not thinking you're a stylish person. The thing is, we all get dressed every day. We all make choices of how we want to dress. What you expressed was just, you dress to feel good about your body because you're emphasizing the things you like and directing the attention. [laughter] You're in control of the attention. That's part of the power of getting dressed. Even if you're not a celebrity on the red carpet or a politician, you're still making those choices of how you want to present in the world. That is your personal power you have every day. Every single person has that. Even little kids have that. They definitely want to express themselves through their clothes. Some of the choices in there, some of it incidentally turned out to be controversial, like Michelle Obama's sleeveless shift. It was just a shift dress from J.Crew.

Zibby: I'm pretty sure I had that dress.

Ann: Every woman owns a dress like that. It looks like a professional dress. It's a high collar. It's black. It's very simple and silhouette. People were so scandalized because she was the first First Lady to wear a dress without sleeves in her official portrait. Also, she had amazing arms. [laughs] That helped. It also was just so silly that that was something that became newsworthy, but at the same time speaks to how conservative and how different we view everyday women versus someone in political power, perhaps. Then there are also intentional ones. Even with the Liz Hurley dress, she wasn't famous at the time. She became famous overnight because of that dress. She was just Hugh Grant's girlfriend, was going to one of his premieres. He had connections to, I think it was Versace. They only had one dress available for her, which was the safety pin dress. She was confident enough to be like, yeah, I'm going to wear that dress. I didn't really think anything of it. It looks like a little black dress. Photographs of her at the premiere were all over the world. It was really interesting that a woman confident in her body making a choice that really wasn't a choice because that was the only dress she had been offered also became a statement.

Zibby: If that was the only dress I was offered, I would not go. You have to be able to pull that off.

Ann: She was also probably twenty-four.

Zibby: Okay, fine. Yes.

Ann: She's dating Hugh Grant who's super hot at the time. She was really feeling herself. Absolutely, I don't think I would either. The fact that a woman was feeling comfortable enough to wear that was already headline news, which is also kind of crazy.

Zibby: Even how you point out in the book, J Lo's famous Versace dress -- I think it was Versace.

Ann: Yeah.

Zibby: Two other people had already worn it. Nobody had really cared or noticed or taken note of it. It was just the fact that it was so right for her and brought out all of her glowing-ness, if you will.

Ann: Yeah, and at that moment. You know what's funny? Looking back at that dress when I was painting it, I was like, wow, it doesn't look that scandalous compared to what people wear now. I remember at that time we were all so scandalized, like, oh, my god.

Zibby: Now people are basically naked all the time. People don't even get dressed. What is that? Let's go back. How did you get here? How did you end up writing this book? How did you get your start with writing and illustrating and all the rest?

Ann: I went to college for a degree in writing. Then I worked for a few years in nonprofits. Then after that, I decided I wanted to go back to school and be a professional illustrator and designer. I did that. Then I was working for a few years in-house as a professional designer and then freelancing on the side and working on little passion projects. One of them was Bad Girls Throughout History, which ended up being my first book. It came out in 2016, but I started it in about probably 2010. It was a book about female trailblazers like the first woman to do X, Y, Z. I try to cover a lot of broad fields. At the time, I was finding myself struggling with finding any female role models who had broken the rules, who had been the first to do something that they were told not to do, which was something that I felt like I was running up against a lot as a young professional. Since I couldn't find it, I started collecting them and telling their stories. The more I did that, the more people would share with me, "Have you heard of so-and-so and so-and-so?" Before I knew it, I had a whole book. My agent had seen it. It was a little zine at the time. My agent had seen it. Posted it on a blog.

She reached out to me and asked me if I was interested in turning it into a book. I was like, only my hope and dream in life. I played it cool. I was like, "Yeah, that'd be cool." We made a proposal, pitched it. Chronicle Books gave us a great offer. They were a great fit for it. They’ve been a publisher of my books ever since because they really get what I'm doing, which is something kind of unusual. It's not a children's book, but it's not a usual adult book. It's a coffee table book. I want it to feel like learning history, but from your best friend where you're just like, have you heard of this cool person? That's the thread of all my books, which is all about feminine power, women in history which have been largely marginalized. My second book was about goddesses in all different cultures because I wanted to explore archetypes and the way women were treated or how females were thought of in cultures, the important roles they played prior to even pre-Christian colonialism, basically. My third book now, I wanted to explore a different angle of feminism and something that I felt like is kind of coming up again, especially with how much we pay attention to -- I think it came up a lot after the 2016 election where everybody was wearing a pink pussy hat to the Women's March. It was the first time that we had a collective style moment where we could feel together even though we were very despondent. That's something that people have done throughout history, like the Black Panthers with black berets, suffragettes with their tricolor stripe. That was really interesting to me.

Then we always get articles about -- there was a while, people were saying "Ask her more" for women on red carpets. They were saying women are just asked about who they're wearing. Then women kind of co-opted that for the Time's Up movement when they all wore black on the Golden Globes red carpet. That was really interesting. These women know that they're in visible positions and what they say has a lot of power because we all see them. Their images are all around the world within the hour. That visual representation is just as important as what you're saying. You could use that as a means of style. Then of course, we see it in politics all the time. We see it right now, especially with Kamala Harris wearing Chuck Taylors and boots. Everyone's writing about it. It sends a message about the kind of leader she is. It's a really interesting time since we are such a visual society with social media. We're getting news refreshed every second. We're so visual that we take those visuals even more as a means of power and expression. Anyway, that was my longwinded story of how I got here and how I ended up writing this book.

Zibby: I totally understood those Golden Globes. It was the Golden Globes, right? Or was it the Academy Awards when they all wore black? Selfishly, I was very disappointed not to have all that eye candy of dresses and necklaces and all the glittery things that we don't get in our normal life.

Ann: I know. I definitely had a moment where I was like, wait, are they doing this at every award show this year? [laughs]

Zibby: How long is this going on?

Ann: I totally support the visibility of it. I love the red carpet because it's such a way for people to appreciate artists too, like a lot of young American designers. Michelle Obama only chose to wear American designers. Their choices in celebrating these designers, it gives them a platform unlike anything else.

Zibby: What's your fashion motif? What do you like to wear?

Ann: Oh, my gosh. I always love a Peter Pan collar.

Zibby: Very cute.

Ann: It kind of reminds me Ruth Bader Ginsburg, of course. I feel professional but also feminine. It's our version of our white collar. I love a red lipstick. I definitely do feel more put together even if I'm just wearing red lipstick, which has been a thing even through quarantine. I'm like, if I just put on lipstick for this Zoom, I will feel like my life's together and everything is not falling apart around me.

Zibby: Lip gloss is my thing. I continue to put it on. I don't even have it. It stays on for like three seconds. In those three seconds, I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm all put together. Now with the pandemic, I put it on, and then I put my mask on. It's so stupid. Why do I do this? But I know. I know it's under there. [laughs]

Ann: It makes you feel good. It makes you feel like, my life is together.

Zibby: So silly. The red lipstick, it's nice to have a signature thing like that. It makes it sort of easier to get out the door when you know that's what you do, the red lipstick, not the lip gloss.

Ann: The lip gloss too. What's your favorite lip gloss?

Zibby: No, only I can ever tell that it's on. Yours is a statement that I can see now. So are you working on a new project after this? What's coming next for you?

Ann: I'm actually working on a fourth book which I'm really excited about. We haven't announced it yet, but it's inspired by a lot of the events of this year.

Zibby: I will translate that in my head. [laughter] I happen to love both your illustration style and your writing style. Both, I find, it's a little bit of flirty fun and sense of humor mixed with actual great depiction of things. I didn't say that very well. Even the title, it's like you don't take yourself too seriously and yet you're also teaching, which is the best kind of teacher there is, really, versus, I am going to make you realize this about feminism or whatever. I unfortunately feel that some more feminist-leaning things -- now this is going to sound bad. I don't know. I just don't like anybody being too didactic in what they're trying to teach or to share. There's gentler ways to communicate. Anyway, I just love it. You should do commissions. Do you do that, like somebody commissioning for my mom's birthday or something, you would do [indiscernible/crosstalk]? I could send you her favorite coat and then frame it.

Ann: I get asked all the time for that, but I really don't have time since I'm always working on a new book.

Zibby: You're like, I'm way too famous and accomplished for a picture [indiscernible/laughter] mom. Thank you for the thought. On my last dime, maybe I'll call you.

Ann: [laughs] I am too busy hustling to make more things that are accessible to everyone. It's way easier to buy a twenty-dollar book than to afford a commission.

Zibby: I'll just say I really appreciate your work. The book is great. It's also a great giftable book. If you even do the necklace and black dress and this book, what a perfect gift is that.

Ann: That would be so sweet.

Zibby: Holidays are coming sort of soon. I'm going to have to remember this around the holiday time, to match it with any of these things, and especially with Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the cover given her recent loss and everything. Do you have any advice to aspiring author/illustrators such as yourself?

Ann: Just follow your curiosity. Those things are things that are unique to you, your voice, your point of view. Create the things that you wish existed in the world. That's what I continue to keep trying to do with my books. Like you said, I like to make cheeky, fun books. I had a hard time memorizing history or being really interested in history when I was in school. My approach to it now is, I rediscovered it as, these are all people just like we were, just human, messy, complicated, funny, accomplished. They could still do all these amazing things. When I talk about it like that and when I'm sharing it with a girlfriend, I'm like, this is fascinating, or when I'm hearing stories from a friend. I want it to be cheeky and fun and interesting and also make you feel smarter and more connected to the world and our collective ancestors. That's what I'm interested in. Think about the things that you're interested in and you're curious about and love and want to share with the world. Someone else will need the thing that you want to make.

Zibby: Hopefully. [laughs]

Ann: They will. There's so many people. You look on the internet, there are groups for everything. You will find your people. You'll find your tribe.

Zibby: That's true.

Ann: How big it'll be... Someone needs what you make.

Zibby: Someone will need it. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for Nevertheless, She Wore It. I just loved it. It's adorable and awesome. Thank you.

Ann: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.

Ann: Bye.

Cheryl Strayed, THIS TELLING

Zibby Owens: This is a recording of the Instagram Live that I did with Cheryl Strayed. I was over the moon to be interviewing her. I have been a fan for so long. You can probably tell in my fandom, adulation, and all the rest when I talk to her. I hope I did an okay job. I was stuttering. I was a little bit nervous, actually, because I'm such a fan. Anyway, Cheryl Strayed is the author of the number-one New York Times best-selling memoir Wild, the New York Times best sellers Tiny Beautiful Things and Brave Enough, and the novel Torch. Wild was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as her first selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0. Her books have been translated into nearly forty languages around the world and have been adapted for both the screen and the stage. The Oscar-nominated movie adaptation of Wild stars Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl and Laura Dern as Cheryl's mother, Bobbi. Tiny Beautiful Things was adapted for the stage by Nia Vardalos who also starred in the role of Sugar/Cheryl. By the way, that's who was in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The play was directed by Thomas Kail and debuted at The Public Theater in New York City. Cheryl is the host of the New York Times hit podcast, "Sugar Calling," and also "Dear Sugars" which she co-hosted with Steve Almond. Her essays have been published in The Best American Essays, The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Salon, The Sun, Tin House, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Portland, Oregon. I spoke to Cheryl on our Instagram Live about her new story called This Telling which is an Amazon Original Story, kind of a mini-novella. She calls it a long story. Anyway, that's what we talked about. It's really great. It just came out.

Cheryl Strayed: Hi. Zibby, hi. How are you?

Zibby: I'm good. How are you?

Cheryl: Oh, my gosh, it's so nice to see you.

Zibby: It's so nice to see you too. I am so excited to be talking to you. You're such a hero of mine. Thank you for doing this.

Cheryl: Thank you. I think you're pretty awesome yourself. I just heard you say that you're a memoir addict. I love memoir addicts. I'm one too.

Zibby: We could talk about these all day. Have you read a good one lately? Should we chat memoirs?

Cheryl: Oh, gosh.

Zibby: I know. There's so many, right?

Cheryl: Yeah. The minute people ask me that question, my mind goes blank. I can tell you a couple of amazing books I've read. The Undocumented Americans, are you familiar with this book?

Zibby: I'm not.

Cheryl: Karla Cornejo Villa -- I should've written down her name.

Zibby: It's okay. I caught you unaware.

Cheryl: The Undocumented Americans, really a stunning, amazing book. I love Motherland by Elissa Altman.

Zibby: Me too.

Cheryl: Did you love that?

Zibby: Love it. Love her. Such a huge fan.

Cheryl: Me too. Also, I'm almost done reading Caste by Elizabeth Wilkerson, which is not a memoir. She writes about aspects of her life. Wow, have you read that book yet?

Zibby: It's on my shelf. I have it. I just have not gotten there yet, but I'm getting to it.

Cheryl: I feel like everyone in America should read Caste.

Zibby: Yes. My mother was like, "You have to read this book." If nothing else, I'm going to read it for her.

Cheryl: That's great. Do you have a child behind you? I'm going to put on my glasses so I can see this.

Zibby: Oh, gosh. Thank you for telling me.

Cheryl: There was a little urchin popping up.

Zibby: Guys, get out. Thank you. Sorry. It's five o'clock on a school night. I'm very sorry. This is what happens. [laughs]

Cheryl: Oh, no worries. I have two teenagers. I don't think they're going to pop up, but you never know.

Zibby: You never know. Let's talk about your latest which I listened to in the car the other morning with my husband and my sister-in-law and everybody. We just loved it, This Telling, part of the Out of Line series which are all about women on the verge of a breakthrough. You're in such good company with Roxane Gay and Emma Donoghue and all these great women authors writing about feminist stuff. For those people on the Instagram Live who haven't read it or don't even know about it that much yet, can you please tell us a little more about the story?

Cheryl: I was approached by [indiscernible] and the editors there to write a piece of feminist fiction, a short story. They basically said, whatever you want to do, just make sure it's feminist. Of course, I thought, well, that's everything I write. I am a feminist. It's part of all of my work. When I started to think about what I was going to write about, what kept emerging is this story that I have been wanting to tell and trying to tell in one form or another for actually many years. It's rooted in a piece of my own personal history. It's one of those scenarios where I've always thought, what if it went the other way? It's this. When my mom was in her teens in the 1960s, she became pregnant. She was not married. She got pregnant. Because abortion was illegal then and, as we know, there was a lot of social censure against women having babies without men, she was basically forced to marry my dad. That's why my parents got married. My mom was pregnant with my sister. She had me and my brother and sister. Onward she went.

When I was a teenager and really asking my mom about her life, she told me this story about the choice that she had, which was really no choice at all. Those of you who are familiar with my other work know that my parents' marriage was a terrible one. My father was abusive to her. It was a very hard thing to endure. The little creative writer in me really reflected upon the impact that that kind of lack of reproductive choice, the impact of that on girls and women. In my mother's life, it pushed her in one direction. The main character in This Telling, a young woman named Geraldine, finds herself in the exact same situation my mom found herself in. It's the mid-sixties. She's just out of high school. She finds out she's pregnant. What was fun and fascinating for me to do is just imagine, what if my mom had taken this other track? What would've happened? What would be the outcome of that? With Geraldine, I followed her. The story opens up when she's seventeen. It ends when she's seventy. I follow her. The story is very, very, as you know, little micro-chapters as we follow her over the course of her life and how she reckons with that decision she made back in the sixties.

Zibby: Wow. It brings up so many what-ifs for so many people, and especially in light of all the prevalence of DNA testing and everything that's going on. A friend, I just saw the other day, just told me that she found out she was adopted. She's sixty years old. This happens all the time now. All these things that we thought were secrets or that people thought were secrets are no longer secrets. I feel like that's really what your story was about. It's this corrosive power of secrets and how keeping them can just affect everything from the inside out for the rest of your life, more so than whatever actually happened in some cases.

Cheryl: Completely. I'm so glad you picked up on that because that's what I was really also trying to interrogate, is the way that silence is always serving in cooperation with shame. The reason we have secrets is we're ashamed to tell the truth. Of course, as we've seen over and over again, that especially when it comes to the realities of the lives of women, the lives of mothers, the radical act of telling the truth is a radical act. Change can't be made until people say, as you see -- I almost just said me too. Me too when it comes to sexual violence and sexual harassment. Me too when it comes to abortions or finding yourself in relationships or situations that you wouldn't have imagined or expected. So much of, essentially, women's bodies are cloaked in shame. This story, for me, was about the impact of shame on one woman's life in the form of my main character Geraldine, but also her movement, we don't want to spoil the story, but her movement towards stepping out of that shame. In some ways, the only way to reject shame is to tell the truth about who you are. That is just a fact. That’s so much easier said than done, especially if you're someone like Geraldine who has been really steeped in a culture, in a generation that said, no, you should be ashamed.

Zibby: It's hard to believe, maybe because I live in New York, that there are still places that view all of the choices as not really choices now, that there are different tolerances, I should say, of all sorts of things, and control and all these things. Anyway, away from politics.

Cheryl: Zibby, I want to say something about that because I think it's really an important thing for us to remember. I think a lot of American women sort of think, oh, yeah, we have access to birth control. Abortion has been legal for a long time. We have all kinds of choices when it comes to reproduction. First of all, those things are very much being threatened on many fronts right now. Also, what I found is we even have kind of revisionist history about that. When I was writing This Telling, like all stories, it always goes through an editorial process. Geraldine, my character, she gets pregnant in 1964. The editor was like, "Wait a minute, wasn't birth control legal by then?" It really was fascinating for me because I think a lot of people are like, yeah, it's been legal since the sixties. Then when I actually did the research and learned that, technically, a very small group of women had access to the pill earlier in the sixties, and they were married women in certain states, that they literally had to have permission from their husband to be prescribed the pill. It really wasn't until the early seventies that women in all states could get the pill even if you weren’t married, which was later than I even imagined. That was the other piece of that. It's, in some ways, a historical story. It only goes back to '64, but that's been more than fifty years now. I think we forget what it was really like for women who were coming of age in the sixties. We think of it as this wild and free time. Actually, most of America was really quite still very conservative, certainly when it came to issues of sex and female bodies.

Zibby: Tell me about writing something like this which, in audio form, was forty-five minutes. I'm not even sure how long it would have been had I read it in hard copy. Tell me about trying to get so much into this format. This is not a common length, necessarily. It's not a short story. It's more like a novella of sorts. You've done in-depth memoir and all the rest. What was this particular assignment like for you?

Cheryl: I'm so glad you're asking about that. What I try to do with everything I write is I try to do something new. I try to stretch myself. Trust me Zibby, there were so many times where I cursed myself. Like I said, it starts when she's seventeen and ends when she's seventy. To really try to tell that much of a life in that small of a space -- it is a short story, but it's a long short story. To try to fit that in was a challenge. With the style -- I don't know if you noticed. I'm sure you noticed.

Zibby: I did. The chapters?

Cheryl: I had to be kind of minimal in the language. Each chapter is almost like a little sketch, just a sketch of a moment or one scene or a gesture or a thought. I tried, in some cases, to summarize a whole era in a very concise way. It was really fun for me on the level of language of trying to say as much in a most economical fashion as I could.

Zibby: It's so funny. My husband, sometimes I read him books. Sometimes I make him listen to audiobooks like this, and especially in the car. This one, he listened to. I was like, "What did you think? That was so great." He was like, "I just felt like it was very abrupt. Each chapter ended in such an abrupt way." I was like, "But that was so great because then you wanted to listen to the next chapter." I think that's what propels a reader on so well, the shortness, the right to the point of it, basically. That's the whole trick of a writer, is getting an image into somebody else's head in the least amount of words, unless you're heavily invested in the actual beauty of each individual sentence, but you have to do your job. It has to get the point across. With the shoes, for instance, that was such a perfect thing. I won't give anything away. The shoes, the spotting each other at the mall, these little moments with just little -- it's great. It's just amazing.

Cheryl: It's definitely, for me, a challenge as a writer to let each piece be what it is. I would say that most of my work, I'm much more expansive and much more like, I'm going to describe everything and tell the full story behind all of these details. That was the cool part, is trying to do that very minimalistic, abrupt -- I wouldn't use the word abrupt, but certainly concise and knowing that there's so much off the page that I'm hoping that the reader in their mind will elaborate on, if that makes sense.

Zibby: Of course it makes sense.

Cheryl: Kristen Bell read it.

Zibby: Yes, I know. That was so cool. That was so neat.

Cheryl: It's funny. As I was writing this piece, it was late last year, early this year, my daughter and husband and I were binge-watching The Good Place. It felt perfect that she was the one to read it.

Zibby: Did you get to pick? Did you have any say in that, or not?

Cheryl: I had a little say. She's the perfect choice.

Zibby: That's excellent. You've been writing for so long. I was on your Instagram earlier. You had the picture of yourself twenty-five years ago for Wild. I was like, wow, was it that long ago? When you read your writing, it feels like it happened yesterday. You're so in it. This sense of immediacy is just overpowering. Yet it's from a long time ago. You've been writing and producing all this stuff about all these periods of your life. I know you say you like to experiment with form, but how do you keep it interesting to yourself? How do you keep coming up with new stuff? How do you keep it going so well? What's the secret?

Cheryl: It's true, I've been a writer since I was nineteen. I'm fifty-two now. With Wild, I didn't actually write the book until much later. I've written all along the way. I have been publishing work since I was in my twenties. One of the ways to keep it alive is I always do take on a challenge. With every piece, I don't feel like, okay, I've got all these years of writing behind me. What I feel like is, how am I going to pull this off? I always feel afraid. I always feel like I can't do it. One of things I say over and over is that the way it feels to me to write a book is that I can't write a book. The way it feels to me to write a short story is, I can't write a short story. I can't even tell you how many times during This Telling that I just thought, I give up. I surrender. I'm retiring. I can't do it. Then you persevere. You get through it. You do your best. That’s the thing, too, that I want to say.

I do want to tell people, you can go to Amazon and get my story, This Telling, just clickity, click, click. You could also get the whole collection, my story along with all the other amazing writers who are in the collection. What I always feel really full in my heart, whether it be I'm writing a short story like This Telling or my next book or Wild, is that I'm trying to do my very best. I'm trying to use all of my intelligence. I'm going to try to put my whole heart into that work. I labor over every word again and again and again, but my work ends with the writing. I can't help it if people love it or if they hate it or if they're indifferent to it. I try to really just focus on the work and not on people's opinions of that work. I think that that in some ways keeps me really alive as a writer because I'm putting my focus always on, how can I make the best words on the page today, or on the computer screen today? I think if I shifted my attention to being like, do they love it, do they hate it, what do they think? that's when I would lose my grounding as a writer.

Zibby: Interesting. When you first came out with Wild and you shared everything, it's like you're an open book. We know all about so much stuff about you. Do you feel as you're going through life that you make different decisions about what you want to share, what you feel comfortable sharing? Do you regret any of the earlier sharing? Is there anything you'd want to take back? How about your kids? Where are you in this today?

Cheryl: There's nothing I would take back. My first pieces when I first began publishing back in my twenties, they were essays that were extremely revealing like Wild is, two essays. One's called "The Love of My Life." One is "Heroin." They both ended up in Best American Essays. They both introduced me to a big audience in a situation where I was really laying bare my heart. It was extremely educational for me. It was a sort of practice for what would happen with Wild which was a million times bigger, but that people who I don't know would know a lot about my personal life. What I try to do as a memoirist and personal essayist is really to try to be as vulnerable and brave as I could possibly be about telling the truth about who I am and about my experiences in my life, shucking off that thing, that silence and shame that we were talking about. My character in This Telling essentially lived her life under the trap of silence and shame. I, as a writer, do the opposite of that. I'm like, if I'm ashamed about it, I'm going to write about it. I do think that, for me, it was really important to be mostly vulnerable with myself.

I'm definitely careful about the things I write about other people. I don't say, okay, I'm just going to say everything. I'm going to talk about my siblings. I'm going to talk about my husband. I'm going to talk about my kids. It's not that I don't write about them. When I do write about them, I am more considered because I don't think it's my right to violate their privacy. I try to violate my own privacy, not other people's. Of course, inevitably when you write about people, you do have to sometimes announce to the world things about them that they wouldn't otherwise tell. I try to do that with a lot of love and respect and also sometimes permission. My kids are teenagers now. They haven't read my books, but a lot of their peers have. I feel okay with it. I think that someday they’ll come to my books and they’ll be grateful that they can see the inner life of their mom. I would certainly have loved to have that.

Zibby: That's a nice way to look at it. I don't know. Would I want to know the inner life of my mom? I'm not sure. [laughs]

Cheryl: My mom's been dead a long time. I would love that. I would love to have that. I think when your mom is still alive and you're active, that maybe you still need to have that kind of boundary. I certainly by no means would ever say to my kids, okay, time to read Mommy's books now. I think that they’ll come to them when they do. It could be well into their adulthood.

Zibby: So what are you working on now? What's your next book?

Cheryl: I'm working on another book. I just finished writing a screenplay. I was hired to write a screenplay about a very interesting person. I can't say who it is. I finished that. I'm doing some revisions on that right now and working on my next book. Listen, it's a novel, but then I'm also working on a memoir. I keep changing my mind about which one I'm going to finish first. I'm kind of running two races at the same time. I'm not sure who's going to win. Memoir or novel? Memoir or novel? It's funny. Wild was published in March of 2012. Then Tiny Beautiful Things was published literally four or five months later, which is insane. I had a crazy year of book promotion, more than a year to be honest. I just wonder because I'm writing these two books at the same time -- they won't, probably, come out four months apart, but they might come out in quicker succession than expected.

Zibby: How are you toggling back and forth like that? How are you structuring your time? How are you allotting time to each project? How do you even, in your head, keep it straight? Is it just, you pick it up when you are inspired for each one?

Cheryl: I'm going to actually do a little writing retreat soon. I think what's going to happen is -- I'm at the moment of truth, like, okay Cheryl -- because I can't. I can't really get to that total sink-in mode until I commit. I've written a bit of both, a substantial amount of both. There's a certain point where I'm like, now this one, I'm diving in. That decision's coming very soon. You're right. I don't go day by day. I'll work for a month on this and get stuck. Then I'll work for a month on this and get stuck. I'm going to have to make a decision. Do you have a vote? Novel or memoir? Oh, you're a memoir addict.

Zibby: I was going to say, I vote for memoir all the time. I also love fiction, though. I read a ton of fiction. I love both. There's just something about memoirs that’s so intimate where I know it's you. It's not like I suspend disbelief and it's a character. I can still get really emotionally invested, and I love it. With a memoir, it's literally, like what you were saying, someone's just giving you their diary. They're like, here, let me put this in your hand. Then I'm going to just stand by and let you read it. I just feel this enormous gratitude to memoirists because I'm like, thank you. Thank you for trusting the reader, essentially, with what you're writing. I think it always helps so much. It helps somebody with what you're going through.

Cheryl: Totally. It's interesting, absolutely. Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things and Brave Enough, all three of them nonfiction, so many people say, you helped me with these books. My first book, Torch, is a novel. Lots and lots of people read that and say, oh, my gosh, that helped me so much. I saw myself in these characters. I do think that, for me, really good fiction, it does that thing where you actually feel like you're reading about real people. You can identify with that character as much as you identify with somebody who happens to be a real person. I think that it can have that function. I will say writing This Telling made me feel like, oh, my gosh, it's so fun to be back in the world of fiction again because you can change your character's plot. You can be like, wait a minute, let's have her do this instead of that. Whereas memoir, you're stuck with the plot of your own life.

Zibby: That's true. Memory, of course, is a big constraint. You talked about writing a screenplay. What has it been like entering the Hollywood land of life? What is like being in the entertainment world in that way?

Cheryl: A whole new universe. It really is a new universe. First of all, the Wild movie experience was as good as it could possibly be for a writer. I have friends who have had really bad experiences in Hollywood. Most writers have the experience of having their book optioned and they're so excited about it and it's glorious, and then nothing happens. I had the great fortunate of having Reese Witherspoon. She was partnered with this producer, Bruna Papandrea. They were just like, we're going to make this movie. We're going to get it done. It was amazing. They got to work on it. They hired Nick Hornby to write the script. Next thing you knew, we were rolling. We shot it in Oregon. I was really very involved with everything. They sent me the script. I would weigh in on it. They had me on the set. I got to become friends with all the people who made the movie, Laura Dern who played my mom and Reese who played me and lots of folks. It was just a wonderful experience.

What was really cool about it is, I knew from the start that I was going to need to not be like, wait a minute, cut, that's not how it is. That's not how the book is. I had to really realize this film is not my book. My book is my book. My book is the thing I made. What they're making is an interpretation of this. It's its own thing. If you only see the movie, you didn't really have the Wild experience. There's so much more in the book. I think that the movie did a really beautiful job being true to the book in a lot of ways and honoring the book, but there's stuff in the book that there couldn't be in the movie. They had to really streamline it more, as you do. Now being a writer in Hollywood too just as a sideline job has been really fun. Like I said, I'm really into trying new stuff. That's how "Dear Sugar" was born. I was asked to write an advice column. I said, "I'm not an advice giver. I don't write advice columns." Then there, I went for it. It was honestly one of the biggest things of my life, a really powerful thing. When I was asked to write this screenplay, I was afraid. I thought maybe I can't do it. Then I did it. I felt like, wow, I learned so much in that process. I'll be able to talk about it more directly someday, I hope. I do hope the movie gets made because it's a really cool experience. It's a different world, but it's also a wonderful -- I learned a lot about writing in writing in that very new form.

Zibby: I think we need to explore at some point, why you keep thinking you can't do it and why you're scared at the beginning of projects when all evidence is to the contrary. I guess that's just the way people are.

Cheryl: Would you please be my therapist, Zibby?

Zibby: No problem.

Cheryl: It's because I'm damaged. I'm laughing, but I'm telling you the truth. I really always think I can't do it. Then I always do it. It's just part of me. It's my psyche. I don't think it's necessarily a sign of weakness. I don't know that it's something I have to fix. Maybe it's just that I'm embracing it really fully and saying, this is how I feel. This is how it feels. It's scary. It's hard. The fact that I always meet that fear and difficulty with essentially saying, I'm going to persist anyway in doing it, I think that's what matters in the end.

Zibby: You're absolutely right.

Cheryl: I think I'm not alone. I can't read the comments, but are people saying, I feel that way too?

Zibby: I haven't been reading them either, but I guarantee you, I know other people are feeling that way because most authors I talk to are like, that must have been a fluke. I hope I can do it. It's not just you.

Cheryl: Is it called imposter syndrome or something? What's weird is whenever I hear that phrase, imposter syndrome, I don't feel like an imposter in that kind of larger way. I definitely feel like, yep, I am a writer. This is my call. I've answered that call. To me, the imposter is more on the daily. There I am sitting in front of my laptop, and I have to do what I feel I cannot do.

Zibby: This is what I say to my daughter when she gets scared to go to school or something like that. We have this mantra. I've done it before, and I can do it again. I just have her say that over and over or I write it on a little piece of paper. Now that's our thing. You're free to use that if that helps. [laughs]

Cheryl: It's a great one.

Zibby: What advice would you have to aspiring authors?

Cheryl: So much advice, but let me just give a little bit. I think that this thing we're talking about is really key. I would say that most writers I know struggle with this very thing I was just talking about, that sense of doubt or doom, or I tried and I failed and I can't do this, that voice in your head that keeps you from writing. You have to come up with a way to work with that. Probably, what's going to happen isn't that suddenly one day you're going to be like, I'm a great writer and everything I say is brilliant, and so let me just type away. That's probably not going to happen. I don't know one person who writes that way. You need to learn how to manage those voices in your head and decide that you're going to continue the work even if it's hard and even if it feels impossible or scary. You also have to find a way to glide past the external voices who say that's not a very good career plan or hardly any writers make a living from writing or all of those practical advice givers who basically want you to go get what they call a real job.

What I would say to anyone who really wants to be a writer is writing is a real job. It's the realest work I've ever done. Of course, it's fraught with all kinds of -- there are no guarantees to any kind of artist in this world that you'll ever have that external success that manifests itself in a check in the mail. We know that you won't get the check if you don't try. We know that you won't succeed as a writer if you don't write. Decide to keep faith with that. Decide to keep faith with the daily practice of doing it. By daily practice of doing it, I don't mean you have to write every day. I mean whatever little fire that you have burning in you that tells you you're a writer, feed that fire. Do that work. Whether you write one time a month for a day or write every day, come up with some system where you get the work done in spite of all of the forces against you that live both in your head and out in the world.

Zibby: Once you finish something great, do you allow yourself to be like, actually, this is pretty awesome, once it's all done?

Cheryl: Yeah, every single time. Here's the other thing. I guess that's the benefit for me of being an experienced writer now. I actually can see, I know the pattern. The pattern is, I can't do this. This is impossible. I can't do it. I quit. I quit. No, no, no. Then I keep going. I keep going, and keep going, and keep going. I get to the end. Then I look at it. I think, wait a minute, what was wrong with me? This isn't so bad. This is actually kind of okay. It might not be perfect or the best thing I've ever written and some people might not love it, but hey, it stands up, man. I did it. I made it. The reason it's such hard labor is we writers, we make something that didn't exist before. We made a story where there was no story. We made a poem where there was no poem. We made a play, a screenplay, whatever it is. Once you have it there before you, it's hard not to have some gratitude and respect for it. Yeah, I feel great when I finish something.

Zibby: See, you're cured. Our session is over. [laughs]

Cheryl: That's right. My therapist, Zibby, has now helped me. It's so much like running a marathon or hiking a long trail if we want to use Wild as the metaphor. Every time I go on a hike, there are times where it's like, okay, this is hard. It's hard to keep pushing up the mountain. Then you get there and you're like, this is glorious. That was worth it. Persistence is such a key piece of being a writer.

Zibby: That's amazing, and also loops back in with This Telling and the whole feminist theme of the entire series, of the entire collection. It's all about breaking through and doing great work and achieving and not giving up.

Cheryl: That's right, and staying strong even through the hard times. Full circle.

Zibby: Full circle. Cheryl, thank you so much. I was so excited to do this with you. Again, I have so much respect for you. It's been so nice getting to talk to you one on one. Thank you.

Cheryl: It's really, really lovely to talk to you as well. Thank you for all of you who are listening to us and tune into this. I hope you go and read This Telling. I hope you enjoy it.

Zibby: Yes, absolutely. I think I have a code on Audible because they're my sponsor now. You can get a free month on Audible. Audible.com/zibby, and you get a free month of Audible. Use it to get This Telling.

Cheryl: You can listen to it on Audible like you did or you can go read it. Go do Zibby's link, everyone.

Zibby: If you want. You don't have to, but I just realized. Anyway, thank you so much. Stay in touch.

Cheryl: You too. Bye, Zibby. Thank you.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

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